the G7 and Australia said that the price cap would go into effect on December 5 or “very soon after.”
It comes after Poland agreed to the price cap and the European Union agreed to it.
All EU states had to agree to the plan, which stops countries from paying more than $60 (€57; £48) a barrel.
On Friday, Poland said it would back the plan after being assured that the cap would stay 5% lower than the market rate.
In September, the G7 group of countries proposed a price cap. The goal is to stop Moscow from making money from oil exports and to keep prices from going up.
It was said that the EU wanted to set the cap between $65 and $70, but Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia said that was too high.
Warsaw wanted the value to be as low as possible, so it didn’t agree until it found a way to keep the cap below the market rate even if the price of oil went up or down.
On Friday, a barrel of Russian Urals crude was worth $64 on the market.
The decision to put a cap on prices was made to “keep Russia from making money off of its aggressive war against Ukraine,” according to a joint statement.
It said that the goal of the move is to “support stability in global energy markets and reduce the negative economic effects of Russia’s war of aggression, especially on low- and middle-income countries that have been hit hard by Putin’s war.”
The agreement on a price cap comes just a few days before a ban on bringing crude oil from Russia by sea into the EU goes into effect on December 5.
The price cap, which will affect oil exports all over the world, is meant to go with that.
Countries that agree to the policy set by the G7 can only buy oil and oil products that are shipped by sea if they are sold at or below the price cap.
Ukraine’s western allies want to stop insuring tankers that take Russian oil to countries that don’t stick to the price cap. It will be hard for Russia to sell oil at a price higher than that.
In September, the finance ministers of the G7 said that their plan to limit the price of Russian crude would cut Moscow’s oil income and make it harder for it to “pay for its war of aggression.”
John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, said that the agreement on an EU price cap on Friday was a good thing because it would slow down Vladimir Putin’s “war machine.”
Russia criticised the plan and said it wouldn’t sell to countries that put a price cap in place.
The International Energy Association says that in 2021, before the war, more than half of the oil that Russia exported went to Europe. The Netherlands and Poland came in second and third, after Germany.
But since the war, EU countries have been trying hard to become less dependent on the US. The US has already stopped buying crude oil from Russia, and the UK wants to stop doing so by the end of the year.
Russia will definitely feel the effects of the measures, but India and China, which buy the most crude oil from Russia right now, will buy some of its oil, which will soften the blow a bit.
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