No. of Recommendations: 5
If you say so.
Your own article says so. As I noted, and your article observes:
"The entirety of their (Reliance's) imports were supplied by (Russia's) Rosneft, albeit from cargoes purchased before the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions came into effect," it said. State-owned refineries also cut Russian imports by 15 per cent in December.
The US has imposed sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, two of the largest oil producers in Russia, to cut off the Kremlin's resources for funding the Ukraine war.
The sanctions have resulted in companies like Reliance Industries, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL), HPCL-Mittal Energy Ltd and Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd halting or cutting imports for now. However, other refiners like Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) continue to buy from non-sanctioned Russian entities.
The tariffs that Trump imposed didn't do anything. India kept importing just as much oil from Russia as before. More, actually - imports in November were a near-term high. That's why India's imports from Russia were so much higher than Turkey's before the OFAC sanctions, and why they were able to fall. Because the tariffs didn't change India's behavior at all the way Trump wanted.
It was the OFAC sanctions on the Russian oil companies that reduced their imports - not the tariffs. Since India had a higher proportion of purchases from those two specific companies than Turkey, it hit them harder. It's going to take a few months at least for India and Russia to re-jigger the oil flows of the non-sanctioned companies to adjust to this. So in the meantime, since the OFAC sanctions have accomplished what Trump's tariffs utterly failed to do, India's trying to strike while the iron is hot and pretend that Trump got a win from them on the tariff side.
