How is Russia financing its invasion while it is under sanctions?
We have been putting your questions on the war to our experts and senior correspondents.
Sky News reader Coops asks: How is Russia continuing to finance its "special military operation" given sanctions from most major economies, and is it true that Russia is often just circumventing sanctions by buying Western equipment via countries like Turkey and the UAE?
Our
business presenter Ian Kinganswers...
Russia is funding its war on Ukraine predominantly through its crude oil exports.
According to the International Energy Agency, Russia received oil export revenues of $15bn in April alone, with the vast majority of its crude being bought by India and China.
Russia is now India's biggest supplier of crude oil.
Russia has stopped publishing production statistics, making it hard to establish firm details, but its crude output is thought to have remained consistently above nine million barrels per day since the invasion of Ukraine.
Now Europe has weaned itself off Russian gas, Moscow's gas exports are thought to have slipped, but it is also selling refined petroleum products to countries like Tunisia and Egypt. Other buyers of Russia's refined products include Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Brazil - two-thirds of whose diesel now comes from Russia – and even Saudi Arabia.
In terms of how Russia is arming itself, US intelligence has suggested it is being supplied with weapons and ammunition from a number of countries, among them China.
Iran is also known to be supplying Moscow – not least with drones - while Russia also has a stockpile of military hardware from Western countries, including France and Germany, that were acquired legitimately before the war.
There have also been suggestions from the US that South Africa, despite ostensibly being neutral, has supplied Russia.
Closer to Ukraine, while not overtly supporting Moscow's sanctions-busting, countries like Serbia are widely suspected of having provided support via the back door.
===========================