India's Venezuelan crude buys jump 51% as Rosneft eyes the same barrels

India's Venezuelan crude buys jump 51% as Rosneft eyes the same barrels New Delhi's interest in Venezuelan oil fields collides with Rosneft's long-standing stake in the same sanctioned barrels, with Caracas's exports up 61% on the year. India imported an estimated 427,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan crude last month (May 2026), nearly double the 283,000 bpd it took in April (April 2026), after Washington eased sanctions on the commodity in February (February 2026).⁶ That matters because India is now openly courting the upstream assets that have long underpinned Rosneft's Venezuelan exposure. Indian energy companies want to expand into Venezuelan oil fields, oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri said on Friday (2026-06-05) at a meeting with Venezuela's interim president Delcy Rodriguez in India, according to Reuters as quoted by oilprice.com.⁶ The numbers behind the diplomacy are steep. Venezuela exported about 1.25 million bpd in May (May 2026), up 0.7% on April's 1.23 million bpd and a 61% jump on May 2025, according to ship-tracking and vessel-loading data. Kpler sees exports climbing to 1.5 million bpd by next year (2027).⁶ For Rosneft, whose annual report landed on Wednesday (2026-06-03), the timing is awkward.⁵ The Russian major has been one of the few foreign players willing to lift and market Venezuelan barrels through years of US sanctions, using its trading arm to move crude that Western buyers would not touch. New Delhi's arrival as a suitor for the same fields signals that the post-sanctions scramble for Venezuelan upstream is widening beyond Moscow. Venezuela needs the buyers. The country depends on foreign oil to meet as much as 85% of its domestic demand, a measure of how hollowed-out its refining base has become.⁶ That dependence cuts against the headline export growth and is a reminder that rising crude shipments do not equal a functioning energy economy. The political backdrop is hostile to easy deals. US President Donald Trump has framed Venezuela's oil as a strategic prize, clarifying hours after American forces captured Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd (2026-01-03) that the oil business there had been "a bust."² Eighteen years ago, under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela nationalised assets belonging to American and other Western firms, and claims worth a combined $60bn have since been filed against it and PDVSA.² Any Indian company stepping in inherits that legal overhang. Rosneft's own position has been built over a long horizon. The company has expanded its retail and downstream footprint at home even as it leaned on a narrow set of sanctioned-crude relationships abroad, the kind of exposure its latest annual report documents.⁵ Russian oil production averaged 9.6 million bpd in 2023, a slight decline of 0.2 mb/d on 2022, and OPEC+ cuts have since added Russian volumes to the sidelines, with Moscow's voluntary reduction increasing to 0.5 mb/d under the November 30th agreement.¹ Rosneft's strategic gravity has been shifting east regardless of Venezuela. China supplied 62% of Russia's goods imports in 2024, up from 25% before the war, and roughly 30% of Russian trade is now denominated in yuan.³ As of 2025, Russia was China's largest crude supplier at 18% of total imports.⁴ The company's Venezuelan barrels sit inside a portfolio already tilted hard toward Asian buyers. That is where India's move becomes more than a bilateral story. If New Delhi secures upstream stakes in Venezuela, it adds a second large Asian consumer with a direct interest in those barrels, alongside the Chinese refiners that already absorb discounted sanctioned crude. The competition for cheap, hard-to-place oil is intensifying, not easing. Prices give little support to a supply panic. ICE Brent crude front-month traded at $95.16 on Friday (2026-06-05), up 0.36%, while NYMEX WTI front-month sat at $92.46.⁶ With OPEC+ still holding 5.1 mb/d of spare capacity as of November 2023, about 5% of global demand, the market has cushion against any single barrel source going offline.¹ The risk to watch is whether US sanctions relief holds. The February easing opened the door for both India's imports and its upstream ambitions, and a reversal would strand any new commitments and hand Rosneft back its near-monopoly on moving Venezuelan crude.⁶ The next signal is concrete: whether Puri's talks in India produce a named asset or equity stake, and whether Washington tolerates an Indian state-linked entity taking ground that Trump has called an American prize.^6,2