India Will Buy Russian Oil Despite Trump Threats

Indian officials said on Saturday that they would keep purchasing cheap oil from Russia despite a threat of penalties from President Trump, the latest twist in an issue that New Delhi thought it had settled.

The defiance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government reflected increasing frustration with a relationship that was once much praised but has been souring rapidly. There is a growing sense in India that its leaders should not allow increasingly volatile American policymaking to shape its choices on vital energy supplies for its huge population, 1.4 billion people.

Mr. Trump said last week that as part of his latest round of tariffs, he would impose an unspecified penalty on India in addition to a tariff rate of 25 percent if the country did not cut off its imports of Russian crude oil. On Friday, he appeared to echo reports of a recent dip in the arrival of Russian oil to India.

“I understand that India is no longer going to be buying oil from Russia,” he told reporters. “That’s what I heard. I don’t know if that’s right or not. That is a good step. We will see what happens.”

On Saturday, two senior Indian officials said there had been no change in policy. One official said the government had “not given any direction to oil companies” to cut back imports from Russia.

At a news conference a day earlier, Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesman for India’s foreign ministry, declined to address Mr. Trump’s threat directly. But he suggested there would be no change of policy regarding Russia.

“Our bilateral relationships with various countries stand on their own merit and should not be seen from the prism of a third country,” Mr. Jaiswal said. “India and Russia have a steady and time-tested partnership.”

Mr. Trump did not say what penalty India might face if it were to defy his call to cut off Russian oil imports. Some officials and analysts have said that Mr. Trump’s focus on India’s purchase of Russian oil could reflect his frustrations with Russia over lack of progress on a settlement with Ukraine, or may be a negotiating tactic as India and the United States try to conclude the early phases of a trade agreement.

Analysts and officials in New Delhi said that if the move was intended to pressure Russia, its efficacy was questionable, considering that China and Turkey, two other major importers of Russian oil, have not faced similar penalties. Agreements for such supplies also involve long-term contracts and logistics arrangements that are difficult to curtail overnight, one official said — especially given that President Trump has expressed doubts about his own measures on Russia and is prone to changing his mind.

“What we also have to keep in mind is that even if India may cut to zero, China is not going to,” said Pankaj Saran, a former Indian deputy national security adviser and ambassador to Moscow. “You will have a kind of a bizarre situation where Russia will sell to China at cheap prices, and so you would have China being the ultimate beneficiary.”

India has drastically increased its purchases of Russian oil since the Kremlin invaded Ukraine. Russia is now the source of more than one third of India’s oil imports — up from less than 1 percent before the war. It brings in about two million barrels of crude oil a day, making it the second largest importer of Russian oil, after China.

New Delhi faced strong pressure in the early months after the Ukraine war began to cut down on its economic ties with Russia. That pressure continued as Indian oil imports spiked.

But by the second year of the war, the tone began to shift on the imports of India, the world’s most populous nation. It appeared that India had convinced its American and European allies that its expanded purchase of cheap Russian oil — at a price cap imposed by the European Union and Group of 7 — was good for keeping global oil prices in check.

Early last year, senior officials at the U.S. Treasury Department visiting New Delhi said India was working within a formula that was proving effective: Keep Russian oil flowing into the global supply but at a cheap enough price that it would shrink Russia’s revenue.

“They bought Russian oil because we wanted somebody to buy Russian oil at a price cap; that was not a violation,” Eric Garcetti, then the U.S. ambassador to New Delhi, said last year. “It was actually the design of the policy because, as a commodity, we didn’t want the oil prices going up, and they fulfilled that.”

Analysts at Kpler, which tracks commodities and shipping data, said they had noticed a decline in crude imports from Russia to India in July. But they cautioned that it coincided with the beginning of a period when India normally buys less oil anyway, because of monsoon season and planned refinery maintenance. The analysts said the decline was “more pronounced among state refiners,” which could reflect heightened sensitivity due to new European Union sanctions on Russian oil and to Mr. Trump’s threat of penalties.

For India’s government, the choice is not easy.

India depends on imports for nearly 90 percent of the energy needs of its enormous population. While it has diversified the sources of its oil imports — it buys from around 40 countries, officials say — its supplies have frequently been affected by U.S. actions against some of the largest exporters. The United States, in the past, has successfully pressured India to give up oil purchases from Iran and Venezuela.

Mr. Saran, the former senior official, said that in Mr. Trump’s first term, India accommodated American pressure by cutting oil imports from Iran to zero. The country wanted a positive relationship with the United States, he said, even if ending Iranian oil imports “didn’t make sense for us economically.”

Replacing Russian oil with new sources could bring additional costs, too. Closer sources of oil, like Saudi Arabia, for example, sell at a higher price to Asian countries because of a policy called the “Asian premium” maintained by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Similarly, a senior Indian official said, India faced major losses on its investments in Venezuelan oil when Mr. Trump imposed sanctions on that country, only for the Biden administration to relax the sanctions — and then reimpose them later.

Mr. Saran said the choice was not as easy for Indian policymakers this time and they might “wait and watch” to see if Mr. Trump’s threats are a fleeting pressure tactic.

“Given how sensitive the domestic economy is to oil prices, you have to ensure that you not just get diverse sources of imports but also, you know, the cheapest,” he said. “It is, in a sense, a national security imperative.”