India has been snapping up discounted Russian crude for three years, but U.S. sanctions that take effect on Friday are expected to end the lucrative trade.
The last supertankers filled with Russian oil bound for India left their docks in the Black Sea about four weeks ago, racing to reach their destination before Friday, when U.S. sanctions on companies doing business with Russia’s two biggest oil firms are scheduled to take effect.
The last-minute stockpiling is expected to mark the end of India’s three-year buying spree of Russian oil. Since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Indian companies have snapped up discounted barrels of its crude, capitalizing on depressed prices after restrictions imposed by the European Union narrowed demand.
Muyu Xu, a Singapore-based analyst at Kpler, a company that tracks global trade, said she was expecting “a notable scaling back of Russian crude oil arrivals” in India after Friday.
India’s intake of Russian crude became a stumbling block in its ongoing trade negotiations with President Trump, who started telling the country to stop buying it over the summer. In August, he stunned India by imposing a special tariff to punish it for buying the oil, effectively doubling the U.S. import duty on Indian goods to 50 percent, which dealt a crippling blow to a range of industries.
Mr. Trump said he was trying to pressure Russia to end its war in Ukraine. But the new tariff only tightened the deadlock between India and the United States, which had already been quarreling over a potential deal aimed at reducing India’s trade deficit with America. India’s foreign ministry called the tariff “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable.”
The tariff did little to slow purchases of discounted Russian crude, a trade that had proved lucrative for Indian oil companies, which refined some of the supply for domestic consumption and exported the rest to Europe and elsewhere.
