U.S. President Donald Trump last week announced a doubling of his planned 25-per-cent tariffs on Indian goods to 50 per cent as punishment for trading in sanctioned Russian oil.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Ruchi Kumar is an Istanbul-based journalist.
Last month, Dr. Borys Todurov drove an ambulance from the Heart Institute in Kyiv to a hospital across the city to retrieve a donor heart for a young patient.
But what would have usually been a routine medical procedure was marred with missile and drone explosions, as the Ukrainian capital was coming under the largest Russian attack since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Despite the attacks, he was able to bring the organ back and save a young girl’s life. But it shouldn’t have been so difficult – and he blames other countries whose imports of Russian oil help fund those bombs. “If India could consider not purchasing Russian oil, even if just for a few months, it would weaken them,” he told me.
That echoes what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited Kyiv in 2024. “You can stop Vladimir Putin and halt his economy, and put him really in his place,” Mr. Zelensky said at the time.
Trump to impose extra 25% tariff on India for buying Russian oil, bringing total rate to 50%
One of the world’s largest consumers of oil, India bought about 1.75 million barrels of Russian oil a day between January and June, at a discount offered by Moscow following Western sanctions on Russian oil. But last week, U.S. President Donald Trump ramped up the pressure on India, announcing a doubling of Washington’s planned 25-per-cent tariffs on Indian goods to 50 per cent for trading in sanctioned Russian oil and accusing India of helping fund Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Those rates will come into effect on Aug. 27.
Mr. Modi has called the tariffs unfair, adding that the imports ensure India’s energy security and that under Joe Biden, Washington had encouraged these purchases to minimize demand on Middle Eastern oil and stabilize global energy markets.
These arguments are fair. But there are several reasons for India to reduce its oil trade with Russia, even beyond the diplomatic ones.
Western sanctions capped the price of Russian crude at $60 per barrel to reduce Russia’s profits, prompting Moscow to offer discounts to other partners. But this has had other costs; Moscow’s shadow fleets – the hundreds of aging oil tankers circumventing the sanctions – have had significant environmental consequences.
The price cap has also been ineffective. It has been breached several times in the last two years, and what’s more, falling oil futures has minimized the impact – and narrowed India’s benefit. According to some reports, the difference between Russia’s discount and the market price is as small as US$1 to US$2.
Since the start of the invasion, India has also increased its resale of Russian oil and petroleum exports to sanction-adhering countries in the West, including the United States. According to Finland’s Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, more than one-third of India’s exports of oil products to those countries – worth US$6.65-billion – was derived from Russian crude in the first year of the sanctions regime. This loophole’s impact has only grown since then; India’s exports of refined petroleum goods to the EU, Britain and even the U.S. reached US$86.28-billion in 2023, making it the world’s second-largest exporter of petroleum products.
It’s all indicative of a larger problem: The West still needs Russian oil. The EU states alone have imported €200-billion worth of pipeline gas directly from Russia over the course of the war, some of which was even transferred through Ukraine. This only ended earlier this year, after Kyiv concluded a five-year treaty. However, countries such as Hungary and Slovakia are still pumping Russian gas to Europe.
Encouragingly, the EU recently adopted a new road map for reducing Russian gas imports by 2027. However, their latest sanctions package did not ban Russian gas and continued to provide exemptions on certain oil products.
The U.S. government has also tried to soften efforts to sanction Russia, including vetoing a Canadian proposal to establish a task force to tackle Russia’s shadow fleet.
India certainly needs to evaluate its relationship with an imperialist Russia – especially if it places the country at odds with not just the global powers, but its own history of anti-colonial struggle. As an Indian reporter in Ukraine, many Ukrainians referred to this shared struggle. But at the same time, the West also needs to do its part by reducing its own dependency on its oil.
As Mr. Trump prepares to meet with Mr. Putin, a weakened Russian economy can provide him with a negotiating edge. And one way to ensure that is to starve the Russian economy.
“The cost of Ukrainian victory is the price of a cup of coffee for every citizen in the U.S. and Europe,” Dr. Todurov told me. But the price of Russian defeat might just be found in an unsold oil barrel.