\n<\/p>\n
India is holding firm on its long-standing ties to Moscow as US President Donald Trump\u2019s administration readies punitive tariffs over New Delhi\u2019s purchases of Russian oil.<\/p>\n
Hopes are dimming that Trump, who threatened to double levies on Indian exports to 50 per cent last month over New Delhi\u2019s purchases of Russian oil, will lower or postpone the tariffs before a Wednesday deadline. <\/p>\n
A planned visit to New Delhi by US trade negotiators this week was called off, Indian officials said. A draft notice published on Monday said the extra tariff would hit Indian goods after at 12.01am on Wednesday, eastern US time.<\/p>\n
Amid the stalemate with Washington, top Indian officials have made a series of recent trips to Russia. Foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar met President Vladimir Putin last week in Moscow, where Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval was also warmly received. Putin is expected to visit India later this year.<\/p>\n
New Delhi and Washington are playing at \u201cwho will blink first\u201d, said Chietigj Bajpaee, senior research fellow for South Asia at Chatham House.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, India has continued buying Russian crude, albeit in lesser quantities. Russian crude loadings to India are currently at about 1mn barrels per day, according to ship tracking data compiled by Kpler, down from as high as 2mn b\/d earlier this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no official directive from the Indian government to cut Russian volumes \u2014 so for now, it\u2019s business as usual,\u201d Sumit Ritolia, lead analyst at trade consultancy Kpler in New Delhi. <\/p>\n
But he added that refiners were \u201cbeing cautious\u201d and were \u201cactively exploring alternatives\u201d to Russian oil, pointing to possible supplies from the US, west Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Ritolia added that it was still too early to confirm a rerouting trend, noting that August crude exports from Russia to India would only be reflected in shipment data from next month onwards.<\/p>\n
New Delhi has struck a defiant tone in the face of Trump\u2019s tariff threats, saying that \u201cthe targeting of India is unjustified and unreasonable\u201d.<\/p>\n
But trade minister Piyush Goyal told a forum in the Indian capital on Friday that Prime Minister Narendra Modi\u2019s government would keep an \u201copen mind, a positive outlook and the confidence that India-US relationship is very consequential\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009to both the countries\u201d.<\/p>\n
India has become Moscow\u2019s largest buyer of seaborne crude since Putin\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, importing nearly $140bn worth of Russian oil, government data shows. Much of that supply is processed by Indian refiners into petrol and diesel that is sold into domestic and international markets.<\/p>\n
Western countries \u2014 including the US \u2014 encouraged the trade, which helped maintain global market prices, as long as it remained below the G7 price cap set to limit Russian revenues.<\/p>\n
But Trump administration officials such as trade adviser Peter Navarro have since accused Indian companies of being \u201cprofiteers\u201d of Moscow\u2019s war.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe US is questioning our sovereignty to decide who to buy oil from,\u201d said Amitabh Singh, associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University\u2019s Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies. \u201cWe would be happy if Saudi Arabia or Iraq give us at the same price, or at a lesser price, than Russia, because this is purely a commercial decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russian President Vladimir Putin greets visiting Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in Moscow last week <\/span> \u00a9 Sergei Karpukhin\/Sputnik via EPA\/Shutterstock<\/span><\/p>\n The US is India\u2019s largest trading partner, with two-way trade in goods worth more than $130bn in the financial year ended in March \u2014 about double the comparable figure for Russia, at $68bn, of which $50bn was Indian oil imports.<\/p>\n Instead, Moscow\u2019s significance to New Delhi is underpinned by strategic relations that date back to the cold war. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is a political comfort in the relationship with Russia which is quite different from the flip-flops and the cyclical relationships we\u2019ve had with the Americans,\u201d said Pankaj Saran, former Indian ambassador to Russia.<\/p>\n Russia has long been India\u2019s largest supplier of arms from fighter jets to warships, accounting for more than 60 per cent of New Delhi\u2019s weapons purchases since 2000, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. <\/p>\n Recommended<\/p>\n Indian officials have defended their right to buy Russian oil, insisting that it has never been the direct subject of sanctions, unlike Iran and Venezuela. Should India stop buying Russian oil, New Delhi could face an additional $3bn-5bn in annual import costs, according to analysts.<\/p>\n In Moscow, Jaishankar said New Delhi was \u201cvery perplexed\u201d by the US position, noting that Washington had not singled out other major buyers of Russian oil such as China. <\/p>\n To Indian officials, such inconsistency points to a broader fallout between the sides and a cooling of the personal relationship between Modi and Trump, who not long ago hailed one another as \u201cfriends\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are the country, which, actually, the Americans have said for the last few years that we should do everything to stabilise the world energy market, including buying oil from Russia,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Data visualisation by Haohsiang Ko in Hong Kong<\/em><\/p>\n The Indian professional\u2019s must-read on business and policy in the world\u2019s fastest-growing big economy. Sign up for the newsletter here<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" India is holding firm on its long-standing ties to Moscow as US President Donald Trump\u2019s administration readies punitive tariffs over New Delhi\u2019s purchases of Russian oil. Hopes are dimming that Trump, who threatened to double levies on Indian exports to 50 per cent last month over New Delhi\u2019s purchases of Russian oil, will lower or<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[964,1466,518,426,3899,10860,72,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-17883","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-donald","9":"tag-firm","10":"tag-holds","11":"tag-india","12":"tag-loom","13":"tag-punitive","14":"tag-tariffs","15":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}India Business Briefing<\/h3>\n