Russia now owns 68% of Brazil's refined fuel oil imports

Through the first half of 2026, Russia accounted for 68.2% of everything Brazil imported in refined petroleum oils (the category covering fuel oil and heavy derivatives, excluding crude) — up from 46.6% in the same period of 2025. In FOB terms (price before freight), the supplier logged $1.06 billion in just those six months, according to the MDIC ComexStat trade panel. Russia already held an outright majority a year ago. Now it's approaching outright dominance.

The scoreboard

The dependency isn't new — Russia became Brazil's dominant fuel-oil supplier once the discount on Urals crude, Russia's flagship export blend, got too attractive for refiners and power plants to pass up, a shift that accelerated as Western sanctions pushed Moscow to route more volume to buyers outside Europe. What stands out now is the pace: going from 46.6% to 68.2% in twelve months is the kind of concentration that usually takes years to build. Almost all the growth came at the expense of smaller suppliers — the United States, Singapore, and Gulf countries all lost ranking share.

What shifts day to day

For Brazilian buyers of fuel oil — power plants, marine bunker suppliers, some industrial users — concentration in a single supplier strips away negotiating flexibility and raises exposure to geopolitical risk. If additional sanctions target Russian maritime shipping, or if the Urals discount narrows for any reason, Brazilian buyers would feel the price pass-through almost immediately, because no alternative supplier remains at comparable scale. Currency adds another layer: since these purchases are dollar-denominated, any FX volatility this half compounds the concentration risk rather than sitting apart from it.

For the trading houses that broker this flow, the logistics route has shifted too — long-haul freight from Russia, working around insurance and flag-related sanctions, now costs more than the historically shorter routes from nearby suppliers, a cost typically absorbed before it reaches the final fuel price.

What to monitor from here

There's no forecast data here to say whether Russia's share keeps climbing or plateaus near this level. Two concrete signals are worth tracking: whether the Urals-to-Brent discount stays attractive through the second half, and whether a competitor — Singapore or the UAE, historically relevant suppliers in this category — responds with more aggressive offers. As we showed in Brazil's biotech exports to Russia reach US$ 12.9 M, bilateral trade between Brazil and Russia keeps expanding on multiple fronts at once, not just energy.