India Will Buy Russian Oil Despite Trump’s Threats, Officials Say

Indian officials said on Saturday that they would keep purchasing cheap oil from Russia despite a threat of penalties from President Trump, the latest twist in an issue that New Delhi thought it had settled.

Mr. Trump said last week that as part of his latest round of tariffs, he would impose an unspecified additional penalty on India if it did not cut off its imports of Russian crude oil. On Friday, he appeared to echo reports of a recent dip in the arrival of Russian oil to India.

“I understand that India is no longer going to be buying oil from Russia,” he told reporters. “That’s what I heard. I don’t know if that’s right or not. That is a good step. We will see what happens.”

But on Saturday, two senior Indian officials said there had been no change in policy. One official said the government had “not given any direction to oil companies” to cut back imports from Russia.

At a news conference a day earlier, Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesman for India’s foreign ministry, declined to address Mr. Trump’s threat directly. But he suggested there would be no change of policy regarding Russia.

“Our bilateral relationships with various countries stand on their own merit and should not be seen from the prism of a third country,” Mr. Jaiswal said. “India and Russia have a steady and time-tested partnership.”

Mr. Trump did not say what the penalty would be if India were to defy his call to cut off Russian oil imports. Some officials and analysts have said that Mr. Trump’s focus on India’s purchase of Russian oil could be a negotiating tactic as India and the United States try to conclude the early phases of a bilateral trade agreement. China and Turkey, two other major importers of Russian oil, have not faced similar penalties.

India has drastically increased its purchases of Russian oil since the war in Ukraine began. Russia is now the source of more than one third of India’s oil imports — up from less than one percent before the war. Bringing in more than two million barrels of crude oil a day, India is the second largest importer of Russian oil, after China.

New Delhi faced strong pressure in the early months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine to cut down on its economic ties with Russia. That pressure continued as Indian oil imports spiked.

But by the second year of the war, the tone began to shift on the imports of India, the world’s most populous nation. It appeared that India had convinced its American and European allies that its expanded purchase of cheap Russian oil — at a price cap imposed by the European Union and Group of 7 — was good for keeping global oil prices in check.

Early last year, senior officials at the U.S. Treasury Department visiting New Delhi said India was working within a formula that was proving effective: Keep Russian oil flowing into the global supply but at a cheap enough price that it would shrink Russia’s revenue.

“They bought Russian oil because we wanted somebody to buy Russian oil at a price cap; that was not a violation,” Eric Garcetti, then the U.S. ambassador to New Delhi, said last year. “It was actually the design of the policy because, as a commodity, we didn’t want the oil prices going up, and they fulfilled that.”