Russia may be about to get rich off of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran.The spiraling regional conflict, sparked by ongoing attacks from the U.S. and Israel, has sent the price of oil skyrocketing to almost $120 per barrel. As a result, demand for discounted Russian oil has spiked. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced last week that the U.S. would issue 30-day waivers to allow Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil that was “already stranded at sea,” promising doing so would “not provide significant financial benefit” to the Kremlin. However, India typically imports an average of 10 million metric tons of crude oil per month through the Strait of Hormuz, Vaibhav Raghunandan, an EU-Russia analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Politico. “Even if half of this volume is replaced with Russian volumes at sea, it will translate to huge profits for the Kremlin,” Raghunandan said. As of February 2026, Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of stranded oil tankers held approximately 150 million barrels of Russian oil worth an estimated $6.4 billion, according to the Robert Lansing Institute. “We may unsanction other Russian oil,” Bessent said to Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow Friday. But permitting further sales of Russian oil would undoubtedly offer a financial boon to the country’s ongoing war effort in Ukraine. So far, Trump has largely proven powerless at forging a deal between Moscow and Kyiv—and war with Iran could only make matters worse. All of this comes after the White House dismissed reports that Russia was assisting Iran in targeting U.S. assets in the Middle East.Meanwhile, Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, called for the European Union to lift sanctions on Russian oil amid escalating conflict in the Middle East, which has brought global trade to an abrupt stop. Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriyev echoed Hungary’s request.“What you propose is very difficult, as it would require EU bureaucrats to think and understand how markets work—and, most difficult of all, to acknowledge their strategic blunders and atone,” he wrote on X. “And yet, they will have to do it very soon.”