Union Minister Puri on India’s stance to buy Russian oil

When asked about India’s 10 per cent reduction in oil imports from Russia in October, Puri explained that this change was due to competitive oil prices in the market.”There are other people willing to supply at the same competitive rate because the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) position is they don’t deal with price. There’s healthy competition going on. If you don’t get it from one, you get it from someone else,” the Union Minister said.When asked if the decision to reduce Russian oil imports was strategic, he said, “These are oil decisions taken in the marketplace. When we face February 22, there were 13 million barrels of Russian oil on the market. Suddenly, if that oil had gone off the market and India had decided to shift its 5 million barrels to, say, suppliers in the Gulf, the price of oil would have gone up to 200 a barrel. So I think we did everybody a favour.”He said technological changes such as green hydrogen and the transition to cleaner energy will change the global oil demand landscape in five years. Puri also took to the microblogging website X, formerly known as Twitter, to share further details. “Russian oil was never under any sanctions and there was only a price cap, which Indian entities also followed.”



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