Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – The Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources (ESDM), Arifin Tasrif revealed the reason why the government has not yet bought the crude oil sold by Russia. Apart from being difficult to achieve, Indonesia also has to compete with several countries to get cheap oil from the land of the red bear.

Minister Arifin said several countries around the world are currently watching Russian crude oil. This situation certainly has an impact on the availability of supplies.

“Now there’s a lot of them wanting to take cheap oil, right? The problem is, is there a supply now? Now that Russia has oil, isn’t it taking a lot of Russian oil? A lot, isn’t it? Are traders taking it?,” he said during a meeting at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources on Friday (09/16). /2022).

As is known, the government’s talk of importing crude oil from Russia was discussed again after President Joko Widodo wanted it to materialize. However, performing the speech is not easy.

“Nothing has been bought yet (via Pertamina) because the goods don’t exist yet. If there is cheap oil from anywhere, just buy it,” Minister Arifin said.

Chairman and CEO of Pertamina for the period 2006-2009, Ari Soemarno had previously declared that from a political point of view, the discourse on the importation of crude oil from Russia could indeed be held. Considering that the G7 countries made up of the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Germany, Canada and France do not prevent other countries from buying oil and gas to Russia.

“Let’s just look at Japan, for example. Japan is still importing LNG in large quantities from Russia, which so far has never had a problem. India has also been importing from Russia for a long time. so no political obstacles,” Ari said. in Squawk Box, CNBC Indonesia (Tuesday, 9/13/2022).

Although there are no political obstacles, according to Ari, the problem lies in the technical part of implementing oil imports from Russia itself. The reason is that the country of the red bear is currently subject to sanctions which have an impact on commercial, financial and logistical techniques. “The G7 itself has said it won’t prevent other countries from buying from Russia. But the problem is technical,” he said.

Not to mention the question of payments made by Indonesia for the purchase of oil from Russia. Indonesia cannot make payments as usual in dollars or euros.

“I see that there are purely technical constraints for its implementation from a commercial, financial and logistical point of view because before we could not pay in euros with dollars, so Russia asked for rubles. Where can we find rubles,” he said.

[Gambas:Video CNBC]