Payments to Russia for fossil fuels
since 24 February 2022
The Russia Fossil Tracker is a project led by CREA to highlight Russia’s fossil fuel revenues that enable their invasion of Ukraine. It also tracks the changes in Russian fossil fuel flows over time. To gain more insight into how this is done, please refer to the methodology.
You can find CREA’s reports on Russian fossil fuel exports, the looming threat they pose to energy security, and the effect of current sanctions, through CREA’s Financing Putin’s War project.
According to our estimates, since the beginning of the war, Russia earned EUR — billion in revenue from fossil fuel exports. European Union countries purchased for more than EUR — billion of these exports.
Last updated on: —
Notice 19th May 2026. We have improved our pricing model for Urals crude oil with an aim to estimate free-on-board (FOB) value instead of over-the-counter (OTC) and contract for difference (CFD) financial instruments. This provides more accurate estimates of the revenues Russia receives from Urals crude exports. The new model lowered CREA’s estimate of Russia’s Urals crude revenue by 7.0% (11.6 EUR bn)1. While the previous model was not designed to estimate FOB values, the new model aligns much more closely with FOB market sources, reducing the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) from 18% to 5.2% and reducing the mean signed deviation (MSD) from 9.3 USD/bbl to 0.1 USD/bbl2.
1Figures are based on an internal review dated 13 May 2026 and may differ slightly from the final published estimates.
2When compared to market FOB market sources between April 2025 to March 2026.
See our methodology page for previous updates.
The European Union imports of Russian fossil fuels have steadily declined since the embargo on Russian crude oil and refined products imports — in December 2022 and February 2023, respectively. Some countries were provided derogations to import Russian crude via the Druzhba pipeline. As of September 2025, only two EU countries — Hungary & Slovakia — have continued to import Russian oil. Russian gas remains unsanctioned.
Oil (including crude oil and oil products) and fossil gas (either pipelined gas or LNG shipments) represent the vast majority of this revenue, as shown in the chart below.
For details on our methodology, please refer to our Russia Fossil Tracker’s methodology page.