India Bought Russian Oil. Now It’s a Trade-War Weapon.

Three years ago, India ramped up its imports of Russia’s oil. It was a move that benefited both countries — and, in a way, the global economy.

Now President Trump is demanding that India reverse course and quit its cheap Russian oil habit or face debilitating tariffs. What would it take for India to do what Mr. Trump wants?

India’s leaders have already made clear that they will not obey the American president’s demand. Its foreign ministry called the penalty “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable,” and said that “India will take all actions necessary to protect its national interests.”

But legally and technologically, weaning itself from Russian oil is not out of the question.

Before the war in Ukraine, India imported just 1 percent of its oil from Russia. When Europe stopped buying from Russia as punishment for its full-scale invasion, India, like China, seized the chance to pick up its crude at a discount worth several dollars a barrel. ICRA, an Indian rating agency, estimated that play saved Indian companies $13 billion over two years.

Quietly, this had pleased everybody. The Biden administration, which barred American companies from importing most Russian energy products, worried that too successful an embargo would upset global oil prices. Rerouting Russian crude kept the markets relatively stable; Europe was able to buy fuels refined in India; and Indian companies made a profit along the way.

Now Mr. Trump has raised this workaround as a weapon of trade war. On Wednesday he signed an executive order imposing an additional 25 percent tax on imports of Indian goods, because, he posted on Truth Social, India profited from people “being killed by the Russian War Machine.” When that penalty goes into effect, on Aug. 27, it will double an already steep tariff, demolishing the business plans of any company with a stake in trade between India and the United States.

Legally speaking, it would not be difficult for India’s national government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to dictate new terms to the private companies that buy the oil and refine it into products that are used in India or exported. Politically, it’s another story. India is proudly sovereign, and democratic. Mr. Modi has cultivated an image as a hard man, but he still needs to win elections. He cannot afford to play patsy to Mr. Trump.

India went from importing less than 1 percent of its oil from Russia, when the war began in February 2022, to around two million barrels a day by May 2023, where it has held steady ever since, accounting for more than a third of its total inflow. It would probably take an equal amount of time to reverse that trade, returning India’s refineries to their previous main suppliers, in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. That may or may not be fast enough to satisfy Mr. Trump.

Some veterans of the refining industry have complained that it would be troublesome. The oil grade from Russia requires certain processes, and refiners would have to rejigger the facilities to ready them to take Middle Eastern grades again. But their complaint is outmoded, explained Duttatreya Das, an analyst at Ember, a global energy think tank, and a former official with India’s national oil and gas company.

“We are at a technological stage where that is really not a constraint,” Mr. Das said. Newer refineries, like the ones run by Reliance Industries and Nayara Energy both in Mr. Modi’s home state of Gujarat, “are interoperable with different grades of crude,” Mr. Das said, and can switch intake almost on a dime. Reliance’s is the biggest in the world and among the most sophisticated.

More serious hurdles can also be overcome. Canceling the contracts, with shippers and Russian suppliers, is something Indian buyers could do by “force majeure,” using Mr. Trump’s trade war to justify backing out of deals.

Most of the Russian crude oil India has imported since 2022 was consumed at home, the majority of it powering the motorcycles, cars, trucks and airplanes that Indians use with increasing intensity as their economy expands. Some goes into portable power generators, or asphalt and plastics.

But Indian consumers have hardly felt the benefit. Prices at the pump, counted in rupees per liter, have been rising gradually since the Covid-19 pandemic. India’s government controls prices carefully, adjusting fuel taxes and other fees mainly to smooth out fluctuations.

It has been useful to the Indian state to have Indian companies spending less on Russia’s oil than they would on other countries’. For one thing, it protects the value of the Indian currency. And it has done wonders for Reliance’s bottom line. But the overall benefit to the country’s $4 trillion economy has been relatively small. Mr. Trump’s tariffs threaten to severely diminish that economic growth, shaving off even greater value almost overnight.