January 2026 delivered the weakest month for Russian fossil fuel earnings since the invasion of Ukraine began. Export revenues slipped a further 3% from December to EUR 464 mn per day, with shipped volumes down 6%, the research group CREA calculated. Four years of Western sanctions have not stopped the trade. They have squeezed it, redirected it, and left it running through a fleet the sanctions were meant to strand.
Reading the revenue table
Crude oil was the only bright line: EUR 205 mn per day in January, up 8% on the month, with seaborne crude up 12% to EUR 156 mn per day. Everything else fell. Pipeline crude dropped 3% to EUR 49 mn per day, LNG fell 18% to EUR 39 mn, seaborne oil products eased 6% to EUR 107 mn, and coal took the worst of it, down 23% to EUR 54 mn per day. Pipeline gas alone bucked the trend, rising 3% to EUR 59 mn.
Who still writes the checks
China bought 50% of the revenue from Russia’s top five customers, EUR 6 bn in the month, and crude made up EUR 4 bn (67%) of that. Chinese refiners, long cool to Urals grade crude, doubled their imports of it to an all-time monthly high. India ranked second at EUR 2.2 bn, though its Russian crude volumes fell 12%, led by a complete January pause at the Jamnagar refinery, a cut-off CREA links to OFAC sanctions on Rosneft, its chief supplier. Turkiye took EUR 2 bn, and the EU itself remained the fourth-largest buyer at EUR 1.1 bn (10% of the top five).
The European line is the awkward one. The EU still takes almost half of Russia’s LNG exports, 49%, and 35% of its pipeline gas. France, the largest single EU buyer in January, imported EUR 315 mn, all of it LNG, a 57% jump on the month. Hungary followed at EUR 199 mn, Belgium at EUR 171 mn, Slovakia at EUR 116 mn and Spain at EUR 114 mn, with Hungarian and Slovak crude still arriving through the southern Druzhba pipeline under an EU exemption.
The leaks in the cap
Enforcement is where the system bends. Urals crude averaged USD 54.2 per barrel in January, above the USD 44.1 per barrel cap that the EU and UK activated on 1 February. Sanctioned “shadow” tankers carried 68% of Russia’s seaborne crude, and 81 such vessels were sailing under false flags at month’s end, thirty-five of them delivering EUR 1.3 bn worth of cargo. Nine vessels moved 21% of exported oil volume, 770 thousand tonnes of oil worth EUR 268 mn, through the Danish Straits alone. An EU ban on oil products refined from Russian crude took effect on 21 January, yet five refineries in India, Turkiye and Brunei still shipped EUR 781 mn of products to sanctioning countries, roughly EUR 200 mn of it from Russian feedstock.
CREA’s answer is structural: “a full maritime services ban that targets the physical infrastructure of exports”, closing the loopholes that special purpose vehicles and the shadow fleet have exploited.
The bigger ledger
The EU Council counts 10 sanctions packages since February 2022, designed, it says, to “weaken Russia’s ability to finance the war” while sparing food, agriculture and pharmaceuticals. The macro results are real if uneven: Russian GDP fell an estimated 2.1% in 2022, oil revenues dropped 26.9% in January 2023 against a year earlier and 41.7% in February, while EUR 300 billion of central bank reserves stay frozen and 70% of the banking system’s assets sit under sanctions.
Sources
- January 2026 — Monthly analysis of Russian fossil fuel exports and sanctions – Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air
- Impact of sanctions on the Russian economy – Consilium
