Indian Oil, Reliance, and BPCL have now run a second straight week without a Gulf-origin crude cargo, and the paper can say the word that last week was still premature: routine. What started as emergency substitution when the Hormuz blockade priced Iranian and northern-Gulf barrels out of the arbitrage window is now the standing pattern. Russian Urals and ESPO plus UAE Murban have replaced the Iranian and Iraqi slate on Jamnagar and Paradip loading windows [1].

The numbers the paper can verify: Russian crude imports to India ran at 1.9 million barrels per day last week against a 2025 average near 1.6; Murban and other UAE grades are up roughly 310,000 barrels per day over the same baseline [2]. The shortfall — mostly the Iranian heavy barrel that Reliance had been running through a Malaysian-flagged reshuffle — is being absorbed by higher Russian run rates and a drawdown on strategic storage at Mangalore.

Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri's line on X reads like reassurance and functions as cover [3]. Delhi's position has not changed in public: India buys from whoever the market lets it buy from, and the ministry declines to characterize that as alignment. What has changed is that the private-refiner desks no longer treat the blockade as an anomaly. Contract term sheets for Q3 are being priced against it. If the ceasefire holds and the blockade lifts, the snap-back will be its own story; if it holds longer than the Indian refining complex expects, the alignment becomes irreversible by the time Delhi admits it.

-- PRIYA SHARMA, Delhi