Global Seaborne Crude Shipments Down 16% Since Iran War Began

India’s imports of crude oil from Russia tripled in March 2026 to reach approximately €5.3 billion—the sharpest monthly surge in Indian crude sourcing from any single country since the disruptions of the Iran war began on February 28. The threefold increase shows that Indian refiners are increasingly turning to Russian crude as their main alternative to Gulf and Middle Eastern supplies, which have been affected by the closure of Hormuz. This shift takes advantage of the fact that Russian oil can be delivered without using pipelines and is often cheaper due to ongoing price discounts since the Ukraine war sanctions in 2022.

The March figures validate the strategic logic that India’s refinery operators—particularly Indian Oil Corporation, HPCL, and BPCL—have pursued since the crisis began: diversify away from Hormuz-dependent supply routes by maximizing volumes from suppliers accessible via non-Gulf shipping lanes. Russia’s Urals crude, routed around the Cape of Good Hope to Indian west coast refineries, is now supplemented by volumes from Venezuela (where Reliance has resumed purchases under a US license), the US, Brazil, and West Africa—a portfolio that spreads India’s supply risk across multiple geopolitical environments.

Global Seaborne Crude: Down 16%, or 7.6 Million Barrels Per Day

BIMCO, the world’s largest shipping association, has now precisely quantified the scale of the global energy disruption caused by the Iran war. Global seaborne crude oil shipments have fallen by 16 percent since the start of the conflict—a decline of 7.6 million barrels per day from the pre-war baseline, bringing total seaborne crude flows to 38.4 mbpd. Volumes over the six-week conflict period have remained 16 per cent below the equivalent period in the prior year. The decline is driven primarily by the collapse of tanker movements through the Strait of Hormuz, which processed approximately 20 percent of global seaborne crude before the war but has seen traffic fall to near-zero for non-sanctioned flows since February 28.

The BIMCO figure puts the Hormuz disruption in historical context: a 16 per cent decline in global seaborne crude shipments represents one of the sharpest supply-side contractions in the history of the oil tanker market, comparable in scale to the 1973 Arab oil embargo but concentrated within a six-week period rather than stretched over months. India’s strategy of rapidly tripling Russian crude imports—at the same time as Iran oil tankers have been given one-time berthing exemptions at Sikka and US tariff waivers on Iranian crude purchases approach their April 19 expiry—reflects the urgency with which the world’s third-largest oil importer is working to replace lost Gulf supply through every available channel simultaneously.