Russia thinks it will find other buyers for the oil that the European Union will no longer purchase from the end of this year. Mikhail Ulyanov, a Russian delegate to international organizations in Vienna, said on Tuesday.
EU member states agreed on Tuesday on a partial boycott of Russian oil. That boycott is expected to affect 90 percent of the oil that Russia exports to the EU. It remains to be seen which countries Russia will now sell the oil to.
Probably China and India will have to do that. Many other Asian countries, such as Indonesia and Sri Lanka, do not have the advanced refineries needed to fuel Russia’s Ural oil. Russian crude oil contains relatively much sulphur.
China and India could negotiate discounts, so that Russia earns less from its oil. Recently, this happened even after many western oil companies had decided to stop buying oil from Russia.
The EU countries spent nearly four weeks in fruitless negotiations over the sanction. But now Russia is being “cut off from a large flow of revenue for the war machine”, European Council President Charles Michel wrote on Monday. Twitter† “Maximum pressure on Russia to end the war.”
The ban on oil does not apply to Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. These countries have no seaports and are therefore dependent on pipelines for the supply of oil. The countries are excluded, because otherwise they would not agree to the sanction.