The US Treasury Department quietly issued a new general license, authorizing Indian refineries to purchase millions of barrels of Russian crude oil sitting in floating storage — a move that unlocks frozen revenue for Moscow without requiring any concessions on the Ukraine war.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License 133, clearing the way for Indian buyers to take delivery of Russian crude and petroleum products that were already aboard tankers when the license took effect. The license runs through April 4, 2026, and applies only to transactions where the oil is offloaded at an Indian port and purchased by an entity organized under Indian law.
The license carves a narrow but significant path around the OFAC-imposed sanctions in October 2025 on Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil producers. Those sanctions — the first Russia-related designations of the second Trump administration — targeted the companies after peace negotiations over Ukraine stalled and a planned Trump-Putin summit collapsed.
At the time, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration was escalating pressure on Moscow. “Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine,” Bessent said in October.
The October sanctions disrupted Russian oil flows to India in the months that followed. The Jamnagar refinery, which had relied on Rosneft as a primary supplier, went the entire month of January 2026 without a single seaborne Russian oil delivery, according to data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
GL 133 resolves the legal limbo for crude already aboard tankers before the sanctions window tightened — but it does so without any stated diplomatic condition attached. Russia does not appear to have made any new ceasefire commitments in exchange for the relief.
OFAC issued the license alongside an amended Venezuela-related FAQ addressing the resale of Venezuelan crude to Cuba, suggesting a broader recalibration of energy-related sanctions policy is underway.
The license expires 30 days after issuance, leaving open whether the Trump administration will extend the carve-out, expand it to additional buyers, or allow it to lapse as leverage in ongoing Ukraine negotiations.
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