Can the U.S.Pick up their needs?
When most countries stopped buying Russian crude due to the Ukraine war the Russians made a deal with China and India to buy their crude at a large discount to the Brent Sea Crude price.
This meant that India was buying it for somewhere between $23-35/barrel cheaper than the market spot price. The Indians were making extra millions daily off this deal. Not only were they buying enough to meet their domestic demand they wee also refining and selling Diesel/gasoline and other distillents cheaper than other worldwide producers.
There was also potential for the Indians to broker that Russian oil by either transloading the oil to a different tanker OR blending it with crude from a non Russian source OR just changing the BOL and trying to get away with it.
When there is big profit potential people take chances.
They may even create a new company to make these trades. That company might go out of business IF they eventually get caught. Meanwhile, they can potentially make millions of profit in trading oil and just changing the paper work on its origin.
I saw something similar to this in the lumber business about twenty years ago. There was a quota then on Canadian lumber.
Companies in Canada could buy cheaper than the market FOB mill with no quota. They would then wholesale it delivered into the US under the market. Sometimes this lumber got double or triple wholesaled. This went on for a couple years. At the end there were several Canadian wholesale companies that went out of business. However, they had made a huge windfall profit in a short period of time. Some brokers literally disappeared and were never heard from again. We called them THE QUOTA CHEATERS.