On the fourth anniversary of the invasion, the ledger arrived before the speeches. The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air reported that in the year to Feb. 24, 2026, Russia shipped 6% more oil than in a comparable pre-war stretch yet took in 18% less, squeezed by the discounts it must now offer buyers. Counting every fossil fuel, revenue across that fourth year ran 27% below the last year before the war: 193 billion euros ($233 billion) in all, of which 14.5 billion euros ($17 billion) came from the European Union. Against this backdrop of volumes up and earnings down, both sides of the continent’s argument claim vindication.
What is at stake is no abstraction. Energy sales have long supplied between a third and a half of Russia’s federal revenue, and the war budget now consumes roughly $150B a year, about 7.5% of GDP. CREA’s running total passed 1 trillion euros in January, a sum the group notes exceeds all European aid to Ukraine combined. The chain from wellhead to weapons is short enough that Croatian Economy Minister Ante Šušnjar can state it in one breath: “Oil purchased from Russia may appear cheaper to some countries, but it helps finance the war and attacks on the Ukrainian people. It’s time to stop that war profiteering,” he said last week.
The wider picture is a cap with holes. Since December 5, 2022, the G7 and Australia have barred Western shipping, insurance and finance from touching Russian seaborne crude priced above $60 a barrel, a lever that matters because Western clubs still write roughly 90% of the world’s tanker insurance. By design, as the analysis itself puts it, “The cap is NOT a ban” but a device to keep oil flowing while trimming Moscow’s take. The hole is the shadow fleet: hundreds of tankers sailing under flags of convenience, insured outside the West or not at all, now carrying the large majority of Russia’s seaborne crude. Brussels has begun naming and barring individual ships, a game analysts describe as whack-a-mole, since new hulls register as fast as old ones are listed.
Asia is the other escape valve. India and China together absorb some 75% of Russian oil exports, negotiate prices directly and settle in their own currencies, so the cap touches them barely; discounts to Chinese refiners run to single digits, to Indian buyers a little deeper. Even that channel narrowed this winter. U.S. sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil in late October 2025, followed by an EU ban in January on fuels refined from Russian crude, “almost immediately” curbed sales, CREA found; over the year India’s imports fell 9% and China’s 14%.
The bitterest fight, though, is inside Europe. EU states cut imports 36% in the latest year and have pledged to end Russian gas entirely by 2027, yet Hungary and Slovakia keep resisting the next steps. When Ukrainian strikes damaged the Druzhba pipeline on Jan. 27, Budapest asked Croatia to move Russian crude through the Adria line instead, and Zagreb refused: ready to help, but not with Russian oil. Šušnjar dismissed Budapest’s cost complaints in a post on X: “Transport tariffs, whatever today’s number is, are a rounding error in the total cost (about 1%), while Russian crude is ~30% cheaper than the alternatives. … All this noise is about money,” he wrote. A European diplomat, speaking to Politico, put it more harshly: Hungary is “getting more and more tangled up in their lies.”
The standoff now blocks the EU’s 20th sanctions package, which Brussels had wanted in place by the anniversary itself, and Orbán has withdrawn consent for a planned 90-billion-euro ($106 billion) EU loan for Ukraine. In a letter on Monday, European Council President António Costa urged him to “act in conformity with our common decision” of Dec. 18 and release the funds; Orbán’s reported answer conditions everything on restored transit through Druzhba. In the corridors of Brussels, the arithmetic is unforgiving either way: so long as the barrel funds the budget and the budget funds the front, Europe’s quarrel over pipelines is also a quarrel over how long the war can be paid for.
Sources
- Russia Oil Revenue March 2026 | Ukraine War Analytics
- Russia’s Energy Revenues Down 27% From Pre-War Levels – Analysis – The Moscow Times
