India imported 4.57 million barrels per day of crude oil in April 2026, roughly flat from March and down 15.5% from a year earlier. Neither figure tells the most important part of the story. What changed in April is where that oil came from. Following the disruption to Strait of Hormuz shipping caused by the Israeli-U.S. conflict with Iran – which broke out at the end of February and effectively restricted the waterway to most commercial tanker traffic – Indian refiners rebuilt their import mix on the fly, drawing significantly more crude from Venezuela, Brazil, Angola, and Nigeria to replace the Middle Eastern volumes that stopped arriving. This is not a minor routing adjustment. It is a structural shift in how the world’s third-largest oil importer manages supply security.
Preliminary trade flow data from Kpler capture the specific movements. India skipped purchases from Iraq entirely in April, as Iraqi exports through Hormuz were halted. Russian oil imports fell approximately 29.4% from March to around 1.6 million barrels per day, largely because Nayara Energy shut its 400,000-barrel-per-day refinery for scheduled maintenance. Volumes from the UAE rebounded sharply to 669,700 bpd from 230,600 bpd in March. Saudi Arabian intake stayed at about 619,500 bpd. The UAE and Saudi Arabia both operate crude export pipelines that bypass the Strait of Hormuz – an infrastructure advantage that Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Iraq lack entirely. That distinction, and its suddenly elevated significance, is the specific detail NewsTrackerToday documented as the key differentiator driving April’s import pattern.
The UAE exited OPEC in May, freeing it from output quotas and potentially enabling faster volume growth into India. OPEC’s overall share of India’s imports – counting the UAE during April – rose to 45.2% from about 30% in March. Russia remained India’s top single supplier at roughly 35% of total imports, down from nearly 50% in prior months. Brazil was the fourth-largest supplier in April. Venezuela ranked fifth and is on course to move to fourth place in May, according to Kpler data. That Venezuela is rising to become one of India’s top four oil suppliers in the context of a military conflict that cut off Gulf flows captures the geopolitical dimension sitting underneath the trade statistics, and it is exactly the dimension that NewsTrackerToday ran the supply map to isolate.
Daniel Wu, who tracks geopolitics and energy, places this in a longer structural sequence: “India has been diversifying its energy suppliers since the 2022 Russian oil discount trade opened up, but Hormuz forced the pace. What you’re seeing now is the permanent acceleration of a diversification strategy that would have taken five more years to execute voluntarily. Venezuela and Brazil are not swing suppliers – they’re becoming baseline. That changes India’s foreign policy posture in Latin America, its refinery investment priorities, and the leverage it holds with Gulf exporters who assumed proximity meant captive demand.” The refinery infrastructure point matters practically: Indian refiners built their configurations around Middle Eastern heavy and medium crudes. Processing Venezuelan or Brazilian grades at equivalent efficiency requires capital investment that some facilities currently lack.
Ethan Cole reads the macro signal concisely: “Supply shock, forced diversification, new supplier dependencies. That’s three separate credit risks repricing simultaneously for India’s energy sector. Input cost volatility goes up. Refinery margin uncertainty goes up. And the hedging instruments for Venezuelan or Angolan crude are thinner than for Arab Light. Not a crisis. A messier operating environment for 12 to 18 months.” Russia’s May volumes are expected to recover to approximately 1.9 million bpd as Nayara’s refinery comes back online. Iraqi flows of around 41,000 bpd are also due to resume in May. Those are partial recoveries of disrupted flows, not a return to the pre-conflict supply structure – and the gap between those two things is what NewsTrackerToday isolates as the core question for India’s energy planning horizon.
So where does India’s energy strategy land when the Hormuz situation eventually resolves? Procurement managers and refinery schedulers building relationships with Venezuelan, Brazilian, Angolan, and Nigerian suppliers do not discard those relationships when the strait reopens. Supply diversification executed under pressure tends to persist, because it builds buffers against the next disruption. Whether India uses the post-conflict environment to lock in a genuinely diversified import base, or drifts back toward Gulf dependence as soon as the immediate pressure eases, is the question that the May flow data will begin to answer. Kpler’s preliminary May figures, which News Tracker Today put in context as the first post-shock data point worth watching, show Venezuela on track to become the fourth-largest supplier. That number will tell the story.
