Urals crude loaded at Russia's Baltic Sea port of Primorsk sold for $116.05 per barrel on April 2, 2026 — the highest price for Russian oil in 13 years and nearly double the $59 per barrel that Russia's Ministry of Finance assumed when it drafted the 2026 federal budget.
The number captures a geopolitical reversal that would have been difficult to predict three months ago. In December 2025, Urals traded below $40 under the weight of expanded G7 sanctions. Then the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iran on February 28, 2026, effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz to a fifth of the world's oil traffic. Russia, the world's second-largest crude exporter, filled the gap — and its price climbed accordingly.
By the numbers: cargoes from Novorossiysk, Russia's Black Sea export terminal, reached $114.45 per barrel in the same April 2 window, according to OilPrice.com pricing data. Russia's total oil export revenues rose to $2.02 billion per week in the 28 days ending April 5 — the highest weekly figure since June 2022, when post-invasion sanctions had not yet fully taken effect, per the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air's March 2026 analysis. Every $10 increase in the Urals price delivers approximately $1.6 billion in additional monthly revenue to Moscow's federal budget, according to the Russian Ministry of Finance's own publicly filed sensitivity tables. At $116 per barrel — $57 above the budget assumption — that implies an annual windfall approaching $110 billion if prices hold, before accounting for the production volumes affected by Ukraine's ongoing refinery strikes.
