Trump Threatened India With New Duties For Buying Russian Oil

Washington is ready to raise tariffs quickly.

The US may increase duties on Indian goods if New Delhi fails to comply with a demand to cut its purchases of Russian oil, Donald Trump said on Sunday.

"(Indian Prime Minister Narendra) Modi is a good guy. He knows I'm not happy and that it's important to make me happy," Trump said, commenting on Russian-Indian oil trade that continues despite duties and sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil.

"We can raise tariffs for them very quickly," Trump added (he was quoted by Reuters).

The US imposed 50 percent duties on India last August. Of that, the White House attributed 25 percent to Russian oil purchases, which have grown more than 60-fold since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and at their peak reached 2 million barrels a day.

After November's sanctions against Russia's biggest oil companies, shipments fell to 1.2 million bpd in December, a 3-year low, according to Kpler calculations. Still, India remained the largest buyer of sea shipments of Russia's Urals grade, which was shipped to Europe via Baltic Sea ports before the war.

Reuters sources in the Indian oil industry say Russian oil flows will shrink further in the coming months despite discounts that have topped $25 a barrel and dropped the price of a barrel of Urals to $35, its lowest since the pandemic.

Reuters' interlocutors estimate that oil imports from Russia will fall below 1 million bpd in January. At the same time, the government has not given direct instructions to refineries to cut purchases, the agency's sources said.

The authorities have nevertheless obliged refineries to report on a weekly basis on the volume of crude imported from Russia and the United States. Reuters sources said the information had been requested personally by Modi, who is seeking to strike a trade deal with Trump.

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