Russian oil companies continue to lose billions of dollars by providing forced discounts to Chinese refineries. According to experts from the Gaidar Institute, based on Chinese customs statistics, the total amount of lost revenue due to these discounts reached $2.2 billion in 2025.
The dynamics of the oil industry’s losses from “friendly” discounts are as follows:
- 2025: $2.2 billion;
- 2024: $1.45 billion;
- 2023: $3.85 billion;
- 2022: $4.44 billion.
The cumulative total over four years shows that Beijing has saved nearly $12 billion (about a trillion rubles at the current exchange rate) on Russian oil. This sum is comparable to the annual budget of the Moscow Region or five annual budgets of regions like Volgograd or Voronezh.
Experts note that the discount size grew sharply at the end of last year following the tightening of U.S. sanctions and the blacklisting of Rosneft and Lukoil. While the discount was around 3% in early 2025, it reached 8.3% relative to supplies from other countries by the fourth quarter.
Analytical summary: The increasing oil discounts for the PRC expose Moscow’s critical dependence on a single major buyer. Beijing is successfully monetizing Western sanction pressure on the RF by demanding deeper discounts for the risk of working with toxic assets. The situation where Russian state corporations subsidize the Chinese economy at the expense of their own regional budgets is becoming chronic. For the global market, this is a signal that the “pivot to the East” has turned into a one-way channel for extracting resources, where Russia has lost market leverage over pricing and has effectively shifted into the role of China’s raw material appendage under strict price dictates.