Managing China’s energy security risks during the crisis surrounding Iran and economic implications for Russia

This article examines economic instruments for managing China’s oil supply risks under transport capacity constraints and their implications for Russia. The objective is to identify the conditions under which route diversification and operational reserves can jointly reduce uncovered import shortfalls. Crisis episodes in 2025–2026 motivate the analysis, while 2024 statistics establish the scale of China’s imports. Both partial disruptions and complete interruptions at a shared transport chokepoint are considered. The framework distinguishes supplier diversification from reduced dependence on a common route. Russia is examined as an exporter concerned with supply reliability and stable market access. The methodology combines analysis of official documents and academic studies with supply-balance modelling and sensitivity analysis. The model incorporates independent replacement supplies, available stocks, maximum release rates, and disruption duration. Scenario parameters are illustrative and do not estimate actual Chinese conditions. The contribution is the formalisation of sufficiency conditions for combining route diversification and reserves. Joint stock and release-rate requirements are derived for fully covering residual supply losses, together with the boundary between the two reserve constraints. The analysis explains why additional stocks do not reduce a shortfall when release capacity is binding. These results support selecting physically effective measures before evaluating their costs. In an illustrative scenario, reducing dependence on a shared chokepoint from 45 to 30 percent lowers the uncovered shortfall from 25 to 10 percent of baseline imports. This is a conditional model result. For Russia, export reliability is assessed through route availability, spare capacity, buyer concentration, and infrastructure viability under normal and disrupted trading conditions.