Zelenskyy calls on trader Vitol to stop shipping Russian ‘blood oil’

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has called on the world’s largest independent oil trader to stop shipping Russian oil, accusing it of “brazen profiteering from blood oil”. 

On behalf of the president, Zelenskyy’s chief economic adviser, Oleg Ustenko, asked Vitol to state when it would ship its last barrel of Russian oil and how much oil it would ship until that date, The Guardian reports. 

Zelenskyy asked Vitol to close its business dealings with Russia in March “to cut off the cash flow” that he said had financed “the mass murder of innocent people”.

The Geneva-based oil trader said in April that volumes of Russian oil handled “will diminish significantly in the second quarter as current term contractual obligations decline” and that it planned to “retreat from the Russian market”. It expects to have stopped transporting Russian crude by the end of the year. 

But in a letter to Vitol’s chief executive, Russell Hardy, seen by the Guardian, Ustenko said: “Those pledges are in tatters.”  

Refinitiv shipping data compiled by Global Witness showed Vitol chartered shipments of more than 11m barrels of oil through ports in Russia in June.

The data showed the energy trading firm has chartered shipments of more than 38m barrels of oil from Russian ports – worth an estimated $3.21bn and averaging more than 9m barrels a month – since the invasion began on 24 February. 

Ustenko said: “Vitol has been the largest western trader of seaborne Russian oil since the full-scale invasion on 24 February. This is brazen profiteering from blood oil that is funding the murder of Ukrainian civilians.” 

Sam Leon, the head of data investigations at Global Witness, said: “Since the invasion, Vitol has been one of the main western enablers of Putin’s deadly trade in fossil fuels. Nothing but the toughest embargo on Russian oil will stop them from profiting at the Ukrainian people’s expense.’’