Putin ally China is boosting Russian oil purchases by nearly 50% after initially cutting back

The world’s top oil importer is nearing 1.1 million barrels per day of Russian crude brought by sea, Reuters said. China is projected to import 1 million barrels of Russian oil per day in the first quarter of 2022. That’s about 47% from Western buyers that have shunned the Kremlin’s discounted crude oil. China previously recorded imports of 750,000 barrels a day in first quarter in 2022. China’s oil imports are now projected to be about 1 million barrel a day, according to data from Vortex Analytics that was cited up by Reuters’s data from Reuters’s Vortexa Analytics that cited up about 750% from the previous quarter of 2019. China has been the world’s biggest oil importers in recent years, buying about 1.6 million barrels a year of crude from Russia. . . .