Chinese companies are buying more Russian oil. They do it with a discount. The Chinese are doing it carefully so as not to soak the anger of the Americans.

This is reported by the Financial Times. Now that more and more Western companies no longer want to get oil from Russia, Russia has to look for other customers. Major Western oil companies such as Shell and BP declared soon after the war erupted that they no longer want to buy oil from Russia.

Independent Chinese refineries have less difficulty with it, but in order to get Russian oil, they bypass the traditional routes and it is less well recorded. They are afraid to otherwise fall under strict supervision and face US sanctions, writes the business newspaper.

The Chinese government has not imposed any sanctions against Russia, but does not want to argue about this with the United States, the United Kingdom and the EU. The US and UK are boycotting Russian oil (kind of). The European Commission wants to introduce that boycott by the end of this year, it became known today.

After China, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey are the largest importers of Russian oil.

China has a great need for Russian oil and is already the largest importer of it. But bringing more oil to China is difficult because it has to be done by ship. And those ships often have to be insured for that transport. The war in Ukraine stopped the premium by as much as 400 percent, the Wall Street Journal wrote in March. Also, banks no longer finance the oil for the time it is in transit.

Customers in countries such as China and India have to finance themselves and take the risk and therefore claim hefty discounts from the Russians. According to an official in China, the independent refineries are taking over some contracts from the Chinese state-owned companies. They have largely denied entering into new oil contracts with the Russians.

The expectation is that the Chinese will take advantage of the fact that the Russians can no longer get their oil in the West.

“The Chinese have found detours to get oil from Iran and Venezuela,” the director of the energy think tank Oxford Institute for Energy Studies told The New York Times. They also found a detour for Russian oil.”