Black Sea Petroleum, a Georgian company operating the Kulevi Oil Refinery that was conditionally included in the EU’s Russia sanctions in July, said on September 1 that as of 23 August, the refinery “has been processing exclusively non-Russian feedstock.”
The statement follows the company’s earlier pledge to stop processing Russian-origin crude, and the EU’s conditional sanctioning of the refinery in July under its 21st package of sanctions against Russia, with the premise that the transaction ban would take effect in six months unless reassessed.
According to Black Sea Petroleum, it completed “its switch away from Russian-origin crude oil,” with the shift following a transition period in July and the first three weeks of August, “when the refinery processed Kazakh crude oil alongside Russian crude oil.”
The company also said that on August 30, the vessel KRITI LEGEND arrived at the Kulevi port “with BSP’s first shipment of Libyan crude oil, a cargo of up to 90,000 tonnes supplied under the long-term agreement signed on July 3.”
In July, Black Sea Petroleum announced that it will begin refining “crude oil of entirely non-Russian origin” starting from August-September, saying the move would “open doors to high-margin markets” for its products.
The Kulevi refinery, inaugurated in 2024 by Georgian officials as the largest private investment project in Georgia’s post-independence history, first came under scrutiny in October 2025, when Russian oil company Russneft supplied its first oil cargo to the facility.
The refinery has since attracted scrutiny over its potential to serve as a channel for re-exporting Russian oil under a Georgian designation, with questions mounting amid journalistic investigations suggesting that Russian oil products may be reaching European countries through Georgia, particularly in light of the recorded spike in Georgia’s oil exports.
Scrutiny has also extended to the Kulevi port, which is owned and operated by Azerbaijan’s SOCAR. In March 2026, the European Union considered including the port in its proposed 20th sanctions package against Russia, but ultimately dropped the measure, citing “positive commitments” made by the Georgian authorities and the port operator.
The EU’s decision in July to conditionally sanction the Kulevi refinery marked the first major inclusion of a Georgian entity in the bloc’s Russia-related sanctions regime imposed in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Council fo the EU explained that the sanctions package “creates the possibility to prohibit transactions with listed refineries in Russia and in third countries which process or refine Russian crude oil and petroleum products. In that framework, the EU is imposing a transaction ban – entering into force in six months – on a Georgian refinery trading and processing Russian oil in Kulevi.”
The European Commission seperetely said Kulevi’s listing “will enter into force with a six-month delay to give the refinery time to diversify away from Russian crude oil.” It added that following an assessment by the Commission, “the Council will then decide whether it is still necessary to list the refinery.”
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