By Barani Krishnan

Investing.com — Oil prices fell for the first time in five days as market participants showed their displeasure at Europe’s continued waddling over its proposed ban on Russian oil.

The inclination to wait out industry data on U.S. stockpiles, due after Tuesday’s market settlement, also led to choppy price action that eventually resulted in the lower close.

New York’s WTI (or WTI) settled at $112.40. That is $1.80 less than the previous session, which was 1.6%. Over four sessions prior, the U.S. crude benchmark has risen by a cumulative 14.5% and reached a high of $114.90 for seven weeks on Monday.

London-traded closed at $111.93. This is a decrease of $2.31 or 2%. The global crude benchmark had also risen by 11.5% between May 10 and 16,  reaching a one-month high of $114.79 in the previous session.

“Crude prices initially surged as China’s fight against COVID appears to be headed in the right direction, but gave up a good amount of gains after US officials signaled that the strategy on Russian crude could switch from embargo to tariffs,” said Ed Moya, analyst at online trading platform OANDA.

“The oil market remains tight but if the EU embraces the strategy of putting tariffs on Russian crude instead of phasing them out, the rally with oil prices might show some exhaustion here,” Moya added.

Participants in the market were looking for U.S. weekly crude oil inventory data after settlements from API or the American Petroleum Institute.

An API release will be made at 4:30 PM ET (23:30 GMT). It contains a snapshot of the closing balances on U.S. crude and gasoline for week ending May 13, 2013. These numbers are used as an indicator of the official inventory data from the U.S Energy Information Administration (USEIA) on Wednesday.

Investing.com has tracked analysts who expect that the EIA will report a 1.38million barrel increase for the week ending May 6, compared to the 8.49 million barrel increase reported in the week prior to May 6.

Surprisingly, consensus calls for 1.33 million barrels more than the 3.61million-barrel drop in the prior week.

With , the expectation is for a drop of 800,000 barrels versus the prior week’s deficit of 913,000.