Crude oil futures edged higher Tuesday following reports that Ukraine fired U.S.-supplied long-range missiles into Russia for the first time, and Russia's Vladimir Putin lowered his country's threshold for a possible nuclear strike.

Market watchers also pointed to signs of higher crude oil purchases by China, whose crude imports are on track to end November near all-time highs, StoneX analyst Alex Hodes said, using data from shipping tracker Kpler.

China's crude oil imports in October fell from a year earlier for the sixth straight month, but the country probably boosted its oil purchases this month as current prices offer relatively good value, according to Hodes.

But bearish views of global supply and demand continue to hold down any potential rallies, analysts said.

"With China finding it difficult to get back on a growth trajectory north of 5% and the U.S. and Europe undergoing a cyclical slowdown, crude oil demand in 2024 and 2025 is set to grow at barely half of the 2M bbl/day pace seen over the 2022-23 post-pandemic period," TD Securities wrote.

Also, the resumption of some production at Equinor's (EQNR) Johan Sverdrup field in the North Sea after an outage yesterday took some momentum out of oil prices.

Front-month Nymex crude (CL1:COM) closed +0.3% to $69.39/bbl, after surging more than 3% on Monday, and front-month January Brent (CO1:COM) finished flat at $70.31/bbl.

U.S. natural gas (NG1:COM) settled higher, with the front-month Nymex December contract ending +0.8% at $2.998/MMBtu after hitting an intraday high of $3.058.

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US Gulf Coast refineries are running the hardest for this time of the year for at least 30 years, Bloomberg reported, as they rush to take advantage of strong fuel demand from Mexico and Brazil.

The refineries processed 9.31M bbl/day of crude last week, according to the Energy Information Administration, and Kpler said the U.S. is on pace to ship 2.96M bbl/day of products including diesel and gasoline this month, the most in more than seven years.

U.S. refineries are helped by Mexico's struggles in ramping up its new Olmeca refinery ahead of the peak driving season in December, and demand for diesel in Brazil jumped to a 24-year high this year as the country's economy continues to expand.