Trump says India will halt Russian oil imports, Modi govt remains silent

New Delhi: Notwithstanding President Donald Trump’s claim, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in New Delhi on Tuesday refrained from officially confirming or denying whether India had committed to stop buying oil from Russia and instead raise its energy imports from the United States.

Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal also avoided the issue while making a statement on the India-US trade deal announced late on Monday.

Moscow, too, noted that India itself had not yet issued any statement on its purported plan to stop buying oil from Russia.

A source in New Delhi, however, said that the energy import policies of the Government of India had always prioritised broad-basing and diversifying sources in accordance with market conditions, and had always been guided by the objective of safeguarding the interests of consumers in the country.

Trump had written on Truth Social on Monday that Modi had agreed not only to stop buying oil from Russia but also to import hydrocarbons in larger quantities from the US, and potentially, from Venezuela, instead.

The US president had made the claim while announcing the trade deal with India following a phone call with the prime minister of the South Asian nation.

Trump and his aides had earlier accused India of helping President Vladimir Putin carry on the war in Ukraine by continuing to import oil from Russia. They had alleged that India had circumvented the sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union on Russia after it had launched the war against Ukraine in February 2022.

The 47th American president had posted on Truth Social on Monday that Washington, DC, would lower the reciprocal tariff on India from 25 per cent to 18 per cent, and New Delhi would abolish the tariffs and non-tariff barriers on imports from the US. He had not clarified in his post whether Washington, DC, would also withdraw the additional 25 per cent tariff on India’s exports to the US, imposed in August 2025 to dissuade it from buying oil from Russia.

A spokesperson for the US embassy in New Delhi, however, confirmed that the final tariff on imports from India would be reduced to 18 per cent.

A source in New Delhi said that Washington, DC, wanted India to go beyond slashing oil imports from Russia and to completely stop buying hydrocarbons from the former Soviet Union nation, in order to press President Vladimir Putin to halt the war in Ukraine.

“Well played, President Trump. I think your message about ending this war -- by having Putin’s customers who prop up his war machine have to recalculate -- is working,” Senator Lindsey Graham of the US posted on X on Tuesday. He was reacting to the US president’s announcement about the trade deal with India and the claim that India would stop buying oil from Russia. “Through their behaviour, India has more than earned this reduction. I’m hoping that the other big nations that buy Russian oil will follow India’s direction,” said Graham, who sponsored the Sanctioning Russia Bill 2025 in the US Congress. The Bill seeks to empower the American President to slap up to 500 per cent tariffs on countries like India for buying oil from Russia. “Putin will only come to the table when the pain is so great. We’re not there yet, but with India’s actions, we are moving closer. End the bloodbath in Ukraine now,” he wrote on X.

The US president, however, had repeatedly claimed over the past few months that he had succeeded in persuading the prime minister of India to slash oil imports from Russia.

He had also claimed recently that Washington, DC, and New Delhi already had a deal for India to buy oil from Venezuela, now under the control of the United States, instead of purchasing from Iran.