MOSCOW, December 1. /TASS/. The majority of European nations have already abandoned seaborne deliveries of Russian oil but Italy and Bulgaria scaled them up before the embargo, according to Argus data.

Seaborne supplies of Russian oil to the EU plummeted twofold from 1.6 mln barrels daily in January to 0.77 mln barrels per day in October. Meanwhile, deliveries to Italy surged twofold to 338,000 barrels per day and to Bulgaria by almost four-fold to 146,000 barrels daily, Vice President of Argus for Consulting in CIS Region Sergey Agibalov said in his presentation.

"Even before the formal embargo introduction we will see in coming days, the majority of European majors and the largest trading companies started rejecting operations with the Russian feedstock. The task to refocus flows emerged full blown as early as in first spring months, and Russian companies on the whole fairly succeeded in that. The bulk of cargo flows was redirected to Asian countries in the first place, mainly to India. We see now the previous volume of observed supplies to European countries at the level of 1.6 mln barrels per day was halved by now to 700-800 thousand [barrels per day] in October and continues going down," Agibalov said.

"Net of the flow to Bulgaria, it turns out that the traffic with the destination in Europe has already contracted in recent months to just 600,000 [barrels per day]," he noted. This refers to seaborne oil supplies only and Russia will continue delivering oil over pipelines.