Donald Trump insists India has promised to stop buying Russian oil, a claim which the Indian government has denied all knowledge of.
It caps a surreal week for diplomatic relations between the two countries, which began last Wednesday with the US president claiming he had spoken to India’s Narendra Modi and that “he assured me today that they will not be buying oil from Russia”.
This would have been, as Mr Trump rightly said, “a big step”; India has emerged as one of the world’s biggest importers of discounted Russian oil in the wake of international sanctions over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, making New Delhi a sizeable contributor to the Kremlin’s war chest.
Yet a day later, the Indian foreign ministry issued a statement defending its Russian oil purchases as in the best interests of its economy and therefore Indian citizens, describing talks with the US on the matter as “ongoing”.
But strangely India’s government spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal also said he was “not aware of any conversation” at all taking place between Mr Trump and Mr Modi on Wednesday.
Mr Trump reiterated his position on Sunday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One: “I spoke with Prime Minister Modi of India, and he said he’s not going to be doing the Russian oil thing.”
When the US president was asked if he knew the Indian side were denying the phone call happened, he said: “But if they want to say that, then they’ll just continue to pay massive tariffs, and they don’t want to do that.”
India’s growing reliance on Russian energy since the outbreak of the Ukraine war has become a flashpoint in the India-US relationship during Mr Trump’s second term.
Washington has criticised New Delhi for capitalising on Moscow’s discounted oil, which Mr Trump argues is financing Mr Putin’s war in Ukraine. The Trump administration has levied punitive “secondary sanctions” on India in response, representing a 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods.
On Saturday, Reuters quoted an unidentified senior Indian official as saying that the talks between the two countries were happening in a “congenial” manner, without clarifying the discrepancy between the two sides over the disputed Trump-Modi call.
Adding to the confusion, a White House official said India had halved its Russian oil purchases, but Indian sources said no reduction had yet appeared in orders, with November and December shipments already scheduled.
India, which has historically enjoyed close relations with the Kremlin both in terms of trade, cultural exchanges and imports of military hardware, is set to host Russian president Vladimir Putin later this year.
Muyu Xu, a senior oil analyst at trade intelligence firm Kpler, told CNN: “I don’t think India can stop buying Russian oil overnight. The volumes are simply too large.
“Replacing that volume from the spot market is no easy task. Beyond the sheer quantity, differences in crude quality and refinery yields make substitution far from a one for one swap,” she said.
Russia supplied India with an estimated 1.7 to 1.8 million barrels of oil per day over the first nine months of the year, according to Ms Xu’s data.
Earlier this month, India’s foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar admitted that trade disagreements remained a key source of tension with the US but said both sides were working to resolve them through ongoing negotiations.
He said that the two countries “have not arrived at a landing ground for our trade discussions”.
“Those issues need to be negotiated and discussed and resolved, which is exactly what we are trying to do,” he said.
