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donald trump emphasis on this India India has promised to stop buying Russian oil, a claim the Indian government has denied.
This reflects an unrealistic week Diplomatic relations between the two countrieswhich started last wednesday We chairman He claimed to have spoken to India’s Narendra Modi and “he assured me today that he will not buy oil from Russia”.
As Mr. Trump rightly said, this would have been “a huge step forward”; India has emerged as one of the world’s largest importers of subsidized Russian oil in the wake of international sanctions. Vladimir Putininvasion of Ukraine, making New Delhi has a major contribution to the Kremlin’s war chest.,
Yet a day later, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement defending its Russian oil purchases as being in the best interests of its economy and therefore Indian citizens, and described talks with the US on the matter as “ongoing”.
Strangely, Indian government spokesman Randhir Jaiswal also said he was not aware of any conversation between Mr Trump and Mr Modi on Wednesday.
Mr Trump reiterated his stance on Sunday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One: “I spoke to Prime Minister Modi of India, and he said he’s not going to do that with Russian oil.”
When the US President was asked if he was aware that the Indian side was denying the phone call, he said: “But if they want to say so, they will continue to pay massively TariffAnd they don’t want to do that.”
India’s growing dependence on Russian energy since the start of the Ukraine war has become a stumbling block in India-US relations during Mr Trump’s second term.
Washington has criticized New Delhi for capitalizing on Moscow’s subsidized oil, which Mr Trump argues is financing mr putinWar in Ukraine. The Trump administration has responded by imposing punitive “secondary sanctions” on India, representing a 50 percent tariff on Indian goods.
On Saturday, Reuters quoted an unnamed senior Indian official as saying that talks between the two countries were going on in a “friendly” manner, without clarifying the discrepancy between the two sides over the controversial Trump-Modi call.
Adding to the confusion, a White House official said India had halved its Russian oil purchases, but Indian sources said there was no reduction in orders yet, with November and December shipments already scheduled.
India, which has historically had close ties with the Kremlin in terms of both trade, cultural exchanges and imports of military hardware, is set to host Russian President Vladimir Putin later this year.
“I don’t think India can stop buying Russian oil overnight. The volume is huge,” Muyu Xu, a senior oil analyst at trade intelligence firm Kpler, told CNN.
“Replacing that volume from the spot market is no easy task. Apart from volume, differences in crude oil quality and refinery yields keep replacement far from a one-for-one swap,” he said.
Russia supplied an estimated 1.7 to 1.8 million barrels of oil per day to India in the first nine months of the year, according to Ms Xu’s data.
Earlier this month, India’s Foreign Minister Subramanian Jaishankar acknowledged that trade disagreements remain a major source of tension with the US, but said the two sides were working to resolve them through ongoing talks.
He said the two countries “have not reached any conclusion to our trade discussions”.
“Those issues need to be negotiated and discussed and resolved, which is what we are trying to do,” he said.