Category: 2. World

President Donald Trump’s relentless use of tariffs to coerce foreign counterparts into favorable deals is about to run headlong into the limits of geopolitical reality.

Trump’s willingness to dramatically escalate the long-running US economic warfare in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine is real, advisors say. His threat to accelerate sweeping tariffs on India is certain to come to fruition, they insist. But he also faces the backdrop of a looming deadline to extend a trade truce with the world’s second-largest economy that requires a degree of caution as White House deliberations come to a head.

“He’s pissed,” one person close to Trump said of his rapidly deteriorating view of Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent weeks. “But he’s also aware of the competing priorities here.”

Trump faces a unique challenge balancing all of his simultaneous demands: He is threatening punishing sanctions on the Russian energy production that serves as the financial linchpin of Putin’s war machine at the same moment he is seeking leverage in trade talks with India while maintaining a fragile trade détente with China.

The convergence of conflicting priorities have driven intensive discussions inside the West Wing about the range and scope of the options Trump could trigger as soon as today – and put a significant amount of weight on the meeting between Putin and Steve Witkoff, his trusted foreign envoy, underway in Moscow.

Trump has threatened sweeping secondary sanctions on Russian energy that would primarily hit China and India, the two largest purchasers of Russian energy. But he’s also considering more tailored options, including sanctions that target specific tankers – known inside the government as the “shadow fleet” – that are utilized to skirt the existing Western sanctions regime in the transport of Russian oil, two US officials with the knowledge of the matter said.

The Biden administration’s evolving sanctions actions found success in blacklisting the vessels critical to Putin’s sanctions evasion efforts. Secondary sanctions tailored specifically to India in some form have also been discussed, the officials said.

Trump feels empowered to trigger the those secondary sanctions that were long weighed by his predecessor, but never deployed due to soaring inflation and concerns about a significant increase in domestic gas prices.

That is a problem Trump simply doesn’t have right now, as waning global demand and a steady increase in output by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and their allies have mitigated the concern about the energy price spikes that bedeviled the Biden administration.

For the Trump administration, that has created leverage as frustration with Putin’s refusal to come to the table has dashed Trump’s envisioned quick end to the three-plus year conflict.

Those dynamics also played directly into the recent breakdown in long running and intense trade negotiations between the US and India, advisors say.

While there is obvious overlap between Trump’s escalating threats targeting Russia and his explicit warnings about India’s energy purchases, the dispute with the world’s fifth-largest economy is specific to the trade talks, the officials say.

“We consider a wide range of options, but this is a situation more of convenient coincidence than overarching strategic long-game,” one of the officials said.

Trump has acknowledged as much.

“The sticking point with India is that tariffs are too high,” Trump said in an interview Tuesday with CNBC. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, has called India as “the Maharaja of tariffs,” underscoring a long-running view that India’s expansive protection of its domestic markets has been a significant frustration for Trump and his trade team.

As the clock ticked toward Trump’s August 1 “reciprocal” tariff deadline and foreign partners offered significant concessions on US market access, India was a notable exception, officials said.

“The president wanted deals that substantially opened markets – everything or near everything,” a senior administration official said. “The were interested in opening some of their markets, but not nearly ambitious enough to meet the president’s view of what would constitute a good deal.”

So while India’s purchases of Russian energy and Russian military equipment was well known on the periphery, Trump elevated those friction points to the forefront as he sought to pressure Indian negotiators, the official said.

Any large-scale effort to trigger secondary sanctions, however, would crash directly into the delicate maintenance of US-China trade talks which have seen both countries utilize economic statecraft, sanctions and export controls to exert or ease pressure on the bilateral relationship over the course of months.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned his Chinese counterparts directly, during the third round of face-to-face talks last week, that Trump was serious about secondary sanctions and it was something Chinese officials needed to prepare for in the weeks ahead.

But as US and Chinese officials have quietly continued discussions over the technical details of an agreement to extend their existing trade truce, the concern about the impact secondary sanctions would have on those dynamics has been a factor inside the administration, officials say.

Trump has yet to officially sign off on an extension, even as his top advisors made clear it was only a matter of time before Trump blesses it.

For Trump, who has operated throughout his second term in a perpetual state of running deadlines, that clock is ticking concurrently with his deadline for Putin.

The decision on the latter now weighs heavily on the status of the former.

State Disaster Response Force Uttarkashi handout/EPA/Shutterstock

Nitin Ramola

Reuters

In January, an old post on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, became a concern for police in the Indian city of Satara. Written in 2023, the short message from an account with a few hundred followers described a senior ruling-party politician as “useless”.

“This post and content are likely to create serious communal tension,” Inspector Jitendra Shahane wrote in a content-removal notice marked “Confidential” and addressed to X.

The post, which remains online, is among hundreds cited by X in a lawsuit it filed in March against India’s government, challenging a sweeping crackdown on social media content by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration.

Since 2023, India has ramped up efforts to police the internet by allowing many more officials to file takedown orders and to submit them directly to tech firms through a government website launched in October.

X argues India’s actions are illegal and unconstitutional, and that they trample free speech by empowering scores of government agencies and thousands of police to suppress legitimate criticism of public officials.

India contends in court documents that its approach tackles a proliferation of unlawful content and ensures accountability online. It says many tech companies, including Meta and Alphabet’s Google, support its actions. Both companies declined to comment for this story.

Musk, who calls himself a free-speech absolutist, has clashed with authorities in the United States, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere over compliance and takedown demands.

But as regulators globally weigh free-speech protections against concerns about harmful content, Musk’s case against Modi’s government in the Karnataka High Court targets the entire basis for tightened internet censorship in India, one of X’s biggest user bases.

Musk said in 2023 that the South Asian nation had “more promise than any large country in the world” and that Modi had pushed him to invest there.

This account of the behind-the-scenes battle between the world’s richest person and authorities in the world’s most populous country is based on a Reuters review of 2,500 pages of non-public legal filings and interviews with seven police officers involved in content-removal requests.

It reveals the workings of a takedown system shrouded in secrecy, some Indian officials’ ire over “illegal” material on X, and the broad spectrum of content that police and other agencies have sought to censor.

While the takedown orders include many that sought to counter misinformation, they also encompass directives by Modi’s administration to remove news about a deadly stampede, and demands from state police to scrub cartoons that depicted the prime minister in an unfavourable light or mocked local politicians, the filings show.

X didn’t respond to Reuters’ questions about the case, while India’s IT ministry declined to comment because the matter was before the court. Modi’s office and his home ministry didn’t respond to questions.

There have been no immediate signs of souring personal relations between Musk and Modi, who have enjoyed a warm public rapport. But the showdown comes as the South African-born entrepreneur, whose business empire includes EV maker Tesla and satellite internet provider Starlink, gears up to expand both ventures in India.

Even supporters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have faced scrutiny of their online musings from police officials newly empowered by the IT ministry to target social media activity.

Koustav Bagchi, a lawyer and BJP member, posted an image on X in March that depicted a rival, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, in an astronaut suit. State police issued a takedown notice, citing “risks to public safety and national security”.

Bagchi told Reuters the post, which is still online, was “light-hearted” and that he wasn’t aware of the takedown order. The chief minister’s office and state police didn’t respond to Reuters’ queries.

Of the earlier 2023 post, Shahane, the Satara police officer, told Reuters he couldn’t recall the takedown order, but said police sometimes proactively ask platforms to block offensive viral content.

‘Censorship portal’

For years, only India’s IT and Information & Broadcasting ministries could order content removal, and only for threats to sovereignty, defense, security, foreign relations, public order, or incitement. Some 99 officials across India could recommend takedowns, but the ministries had the final say.

While that mechanism remains in place, Modi’s IT ministry in 2023 empowered all federal and state agencies and police to issue takedown notices for “any information which is prohibited under any law”. They could do so under existing legal provisions, the ministry said in a directive, citing the need for “effective” content removal.

Companies that fail to comply can lose immunity for user content, making them liable for the same penalties a user might face — which could vary greatly depending on the specific material posted.

Modi’s government went a step further in October 2024. It launched a website called Sahyog — Hindi for collaboration — to “facilitate” the issuance of takedown notices, and asked Indian officials and social media firms to get on board, memos contained in court papers show.

X didn’t join Sahyog, which it has called a “censorship portal”, and sued the government earlier this year, challenging the legal basis for both the new website and the IT ministry’s 2023 directive.

In a June 24 filing, X said some of the blocking orders issued by officials “target content involving satire or criticism of the ruling government, and show a pattern of abuse of authority to suppress free speech”.

Some free-speech advocates have criticised the government’s stricter takedown regime, saying it is designed to stifle dissent.

“Can a claim that some content is unlawful be termed as indeed unlawful merely because the government claims so?” said Subramaniam Vincent, director of journalism and media ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Centre for Applied Ethics.

“The executive branch cannot be both the arbiter of legality of media content, and the issuer of takedown notices.”

Red dinosaur

Court filings reviewed by Reuters show federal and state agencies ordered X to remove around 1,400 posts or accounts between March 2024 and June 2025.

More than 70 per cent of these removal notices were issued by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, which developed the Sahyog website.

The agency is within the home ministry, which is headed by Modi aide Amit Shah, a powerful figure in the ruling BJP.

To counter X in court, India’s government filed a 92-page report drafted by the cybercrime unit to show X is “hosting illegal content”. The unit analysed nearly 300 posts it deemed unlawful, including misinformation, hoaxes, and child sexual-abuse material.

X serves as a vehicle for “spreading hate and division” that threatens social harmony, while “fake news” on the platform has sparked unspecified law-and-order issues, the agency said in the report.

The government’s response to X’s lawsuit highlighted examples of misinformation.

In January, the cybercrime unit asked X to remove three posts containing what officials said were fabricated images that portrayed Shah’s son, International Cricket Council chairman Jay Shah, “in a derogatory manner” alongside a bikini-clad woman.

The posts “dishonour prominent office bearers and VIPs”, the notices said.

Two of those posts remain online. Jay Shah didn’t respond to Reuters queries.

Other directives went beyond targeting fake news. X told the court India’s railways ministry has been issuing orders to censor press reports about matters of public interest.

These included February directives seeking the removal of posts by some media outlets, including two by Adani Group’s NDTV, that contained news coverage of stampede at New Delhi’s biggest railway station that left 18 dead.

The NDTV posts are still online. NDTV didn’t respond to Reuters queries and the railways ministry declined to comment.

In April, police in Chennai asked X to remove many “deeply offensive” and “provocative” posts, including a now-inaccessible cartoon featuring a red dinosaur labelled “inflation”, which portrayed Modi and the chief minister of Tamil Nadu state as struggling to control prices.

The same month, police demanded the removal of another cartoon that mocked the state government’s lack of preparedness for floods by showing a boat with holes.

X told the judge the cartoon was posted in November, and it could not “incite political tensions” several months later, as the Chennai police asserted. The post remains online.

The state government didn’t respond to a request for comment.

When Reuters visited the Chennai cybercrime police station that issued these directives, Deputy Commissioner B. Geetha criticised X for seldom acting on takedown requests.

X does not “fully grasp the cultural sensitivities”, she said. “What may be acceptable in some countries can be considered taboo in India.”

Thousands of people in the besieged capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, El-Fasher, are in danger of starvation, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Tuesday. 

The rebel group Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has sought to seize El-Fasher since May 2024. It is the last major city in North Darfur still under the Sudanese government’s control.

Around 300,000 people remain in the besieged city under increasingly desperate conditions, according to UN figures. 

What did the UN say about El-Fasher? 

The WFP said food prices in El-Fasher rose by 460% compared to the rest of the country, forcing soup kitchens to shut while aid remains blocked.

“Everyone in El-Fasher is facing a daily struggle to survive,” said Eric Perdison, the WFP’s regional director for eastern and southern Africa.

The UN said it had been unable to deliver food to the city by land for more than a year due to blocked access routes. 

“We have not had access to the horrible situation unfolding in El-Fasher, despite trying for months and months and months,” UNICEF’s Sheldon Yett said after visiting Sudan.

Last year, the UN declared famine in the displacement camps surrounding El-Fasher. It was estimated that starvation would take hold in the city by May this year, but a lack of data has prevented an official famine declaration.

What is the situation in Sudan?

Since April 2023, the war has killed tens of thousands across Sudan, displaced more than 12 million and left 26 million at risk of hunger. The UN describes it as the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis.

In March, the Sudanese army pushed out the RSF from its positions in Khartoum, raising hopes for a turning point in the war.

Yett said relative calm may have returned to Khartoum, but children there still have only “limited, but growing access to safe water, food, healthcare and learning.” 

“Children are dying from hunger, disease and direct violence,” said Yett, calling it a “looming catastrophe.”

“We are on the verge of irreversible damage to an entire generation of children.” 

Edited by: Louis Oelofse

Russia’s Kamchatka region is moving southeast from the mainland following an 8.8 magnitude Earthquake. Scientists are baffled as the peninsula has already moved 6.5 feet.

It has been revealed that the landmass’s movement is similar to the movement caused by the 9 magnitude Earthquake, fifth largest in the recorded history, in Japan in 2011.

The Russian Academy of Sciences took to Telegram to reveal the surprising development, stating, “We made a preliminary calculation based on the results of geodynamic observation.”

“It turned out that we all went quite well to the southeast. The maximum coseismic displacements after the earthquake of July 30 were observed in the southern part of the peninsula,” the statement continued.

The intense seismic activity created so much energy that the Eurasian and Pacific plates, which meet and lock against one another at Kamchatka peninsula, might have slipped past each other causing landmass’s movement.

Experts reveal that the process can continue for days and even weeks after the initial Earthquake until the plates adjust their positions and settle thus allowing the landmass to move several meters.

Other than the landmass movement, two volcanic eruptions have also occurred in the aftermath of the sixth strongest earthquake in recorded history.

There’s a fear that it might start a chain of eruptions across the Pacific Ring of Fire which in home to over 425 active volcanoes. 

GAZA/CAIRO: Weakened by hunger, many Gazans trek across a ruined landscape each day to haul all their drinking and washing water — a painful load that is still far below the levels needed to keep people healthy.

Even as global attention has turned to starvation in Gaza, where after 22 months of a devastating Israeli military campaign a global hunger monitor says a famine scenario is unfolding, the water crisis is just as severe according to aid groups.

Though some water comes from small desalination units run by aid agencies, most is drawn from wells in a brackish aquifer that has been further polluted by sewage and chemicals seeping through the rubble, spreading diarrhea and hepatitis.

Israeli pipelines that once supplied Gaza with much of its clean water are now dry. Israel stopped all water and electricity supply to Gaza early in the war. Although it resumed some supply later, pipelines were damaged and Gaza water officials say none has entered recently.

COGAT, the Israeli military aid coordination agency, did not respond to a request for comment on whether Israel is supplying water.

Most water and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed and pumps from the aquifer often rely on electricity from small generators — for which fuel is rarely available.

Moaz Mukhaimar, aged 23 and a university student before the war, said he has to walk about a kilometer, queuing for two hours, to fetch water. He often goes three times a day, dragging it back to the family tent over bumpy ground on a small metal handcart.

“How long will we have to stay like this?” he asked, pulling two larger canisters of very brackish water to use for cleaning and two smaller ones of cleaner water to drink.

His mother, Umm Moaz, 53, said the water he collects is needed for the extended family of 20 people living in their small group of tents in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

“The children keep coming and going and it is hot. They keep wanting to drink. Who knows if tomorrow we will be able to fill up again,” she said.

Their struggle for water is replicated across the tiny, crowded territory where nearly everybody is living in temporary shelters or tents without sewage or hygiene facilities and not enough water to drink, cook and wash as disease spreads.

The United Nations says the minimum emergency level of water consumption per person is 15 liters a day for drinking, cooking, cleaning and washing. Average daily consumption in Israel is around 247 liters a day according to Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

Bushra Khalidi, humanitarian policy lead for aid agency Oxfam in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories said the average consumption in Gaza now was 3-5 liters a day.

Oxfam said last week that preventable and treatable water-borne diseases were “ripping through Gaza,” with reported rates increasing by almost 150 percent over the past three months.

Israel blames Hamas for the suffering in Gaza and says it provides adequate aid for the territory’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

QUEUES FOR WATER

“Water scarcity is definitely increasing very much each day and people are basically rationing between either they want to use water for drinking or they want to use a lot for hygiene,” said Danish Malik, a global water and sanitation official for the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Merely queuing for water and carrying it now accounts for hours each day for many Gazans, often involving jostling with others for a place in the queue. Scuffles have sometimes broken out, Gazans say.

Collecting water is often the job of children as their parents seek out food or other necessities.

“The children have lost their childhood and become carriers of plastic containers, running behind water vehicles or going far into remote areas to fill them for their families,” said Munther Salem, water resources head at the Gaza Water and Environment Quality Authority.

With water so hard to get, many people living near the beach wash in the sea.

A new water pipeline funded by the United Arab Emirates is planned, to serve 600,000 people in southern Gaza from a desalination plant in Egypt. But it could take several more weeks to be connected.

Much more is needed, aid agencies say. UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said the long-term deprivations were becoming deadly. “Starvation and dehydration are no longer side effects of this conflict. They are very much frontline effects.”

Oxfam’s Khalidi said a ceasefire and unfettered access for aid agencies was needed to resolve the crisis.

“Otherwise we will see people dying from the most preventable diseases in Gaza — which is already happening before our eyes.”

LUCKNOW, India — Rescuers were scouring a devastated Himalayan village in northern India to find dozens of missing people, a day after flash floods killed at least four people and left many others trapped under debris, officials said Wednesday.

Flood waters triggered by intense rains gushed down the narrow mountains Tuesday into Dharali, a mountain village in Uttarakhand state, sweeping away homes, roads and a local market.

Teams of army and disaster force rescuers were searching for dozens, including at least 11 Indian army soldiers, who are believed to be trapped under the rubble. Authorities said rescue workers had recovered four bodies by Wednesday.

“The search for others is still underway,” said Dilip Singh, a disaster management official. Singh said at least 60 people have been rescued so far and moved to safer locations, but adverse weather conditions, damaged roads and rugged terrain were hampering rescue efforts.

An Indian army camp in Harsil, some 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) from the flooded village of Dharali, was also hit by flash floods and 11 army personnel were missing, said Col. Harshvardhan, who was leading rescue efforts.

“The conditions are extremely challenging, but our teams are staying put,” said Lt. Col. Manish Srivastava, a defense spokesperson.

The flooding in northern India is the latest in a series of disasters that have battered the Himalayan mountains in the last few months.

Sudden, intense downpours over small areas known as cloudbursts are increasingly common in Uttarakhand, a Himalayan region prone to flash floods and landslides during the monsoon season. Cloudbursts have the potential to wreak havoc by causing intense flooding and landslides, impacting thousands of people in the mountainous regions.

Similar incidents were recorded in Dharali in 1864, 2013 and 2014. More than 6,000 people died and 4,500 villages were affected when a similar cloudburst devastated Uttarakhand state in 2013.

Experts say cloudbursts have increased in recent years partly due to climate change, while damage from the storms also has increased because of unplanned development in mountain regions.

“This village sits on a ticking time bomb,” said geologist S.P. Sati. “It is in a highly fragile zone.”

Uttarakhand, known for its rugged terrain, spiritual pilgrimage sites and popular tourist destinations, has witnessed a growing number of extreme weather events in recent years.

Lokendra Bisht, a local lawmaker who runs a homestay in the area, said people ran for their lives, but the flood waters came so fast that “there was nothing anyone could do.”

“The whole of Dharali village was wiped out,” he said.

—

Saaliq reported from New Delhi.

Donald Trump has demanded India stop buying Vladimir Putin’s oil or face punishing tariffs. The problem for Prime Minister Narendra Modi is there may be no easy way to do it.

After years of his country bingeing on cheap Russian crude, India’s prime minister faces a geopolitical dilemma as well as a practical challenge should he seek to re-engineer the energy supply mix of the world’s third-biggest oil importer.

India buys about 90 per cent of its crude oil from overseas and has been the biggest market for Russian seaborne crude since 2023, according to ship tracking data compiled by Kpler. India imports about 5mn barrels of oil a day, of which 2mn come from Russia.

“Where would India find 2mn barrels a day of crude just like that?,” said Sumit Ritolia, a lead Kpler analyst. It could “pivot more towards non-Russian barrels. But I don’t think we’ll see a day when India stops buying Russian oil”.

In February, Trump and Modi, who the US president hailed as his “great friend”, agreed to increase US energy exports to India. Yet the distance between the countries — compared with much shorter shipping routes from Russia and the Middle East — and the technical challenge for Indian refineries of switching between different types of crude have limited that option.

“Replacing Russian barrels in full is no easy feat,” added Ritolia. “Gulf barrels come with pricing rigidity, African grades add freight volatility and Latin American flows face availability constraints.”

Trump has threatened to levy “substantially higher” tariffs on India than the 25 per cent rate he landed on last week, warning that it could be announced as soon as Wednesday.

“They are buying Russian oil, they are fuelling the Russian war machine and if they are going to do that then I am not going to be happy,” the US president told CNBC on Tuesday.

Modi has a difficult set of options: swallow the US tariffs, shift from Russian oil to other suppliers, or try to find a compromise with Trump, whereby India curtails Russian crude purchases without ceasing it altogether.

Shilan Shah at Capital Economics wrote in a note to clients that he doubted India would make “a wholehearted effort to wean itself off Russian oil” because Modi would be reluctant to upend cordial relations with Moscow or face criticism at home for appearing to capitulate to Trump.

The prime minister’s strongman image has also taken a hit domestically over Trump’s claim, rejected by New Delhi, to have mediated a ceasefire in a brief conflict between India and Pakistan in May.

The Kremlin has described US demands on India as “threats”.

“Attempts to pressure countries into cutting trade ties with Russia — we do not consider such statements legitimate,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.

Trump’s pique marks a shift from the Biden administration, which made space for India’s oil trade with Russia, as long as it remained below the $60 a barrel G7 price cap. This aimed to keep global prices in check while limit Russian oil revenue.

Six months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar defended purchases of Russian oil, saying it was his “moral duty” to secure the “best deal” for Indian citizens.

A person involved in India’s oil sector said the country’s refineries operated by the book and that Russian oil had never been the direct subject of sanctions, unlike Iran and Venezuela. “India has been the most responsible international actor in this chain of events. We do not buy sanctioned oil,” the person said.

“The reason why India continues to buy is because there is no other choice,” the person added. “If India doesn’t buy from the world’s third-largest largest oil supplier, which produces 10 per cent of global production, then where are the alternate barrels going to come from?”

Although the steep discounts seen after the start of the Ukraine war have narrowed, the economics of Russian crude, which continues to trade at a steep discount, remain compelling, analysts said. That has provided a buffer for the Indian government to keep inflation in check, rein in the fiscal cost of fuel subsidies and maintain the profitability of its refineries.

A sudden halt of Indian purchases of Russian oil could also affect global markets. Premasish Das, head of analysis of oil markets in Asia at S&P Global Commodity Insights, said if India suddenly turned to other suppliers, it would create “a significant tightness into the market”, potentially pushing the price of crude to more than $80 a barrel, from current levels of about $67.

“While a complete disengagement from Russian crude remains unlikely in the near term,” Ritolia said, “India is prepared for gradual diversification — conditional on policy guidance from the government, market signals, and evolving risk premiums.”

India also exports about 1.4mn tonnes of refined oil a month — some of it containing cheaper Russian product — to destinations including Europe.

While much of that oil is produced by private Indian companies, including Reliance, analysts said New Delhi could mandate they switch to other crudes and restrict Russian oil for domestic consumption, which would protect domestic prices, and assuage concerns from some governments about buying product containing Russian oil.

Whether such a partial move would be accepted by private Indian refiners and enough to sway Trump remains unclear.

India purchases of Russian crude have already begun to fall. Kpler data shows Indian refiners’ July volumes of Russian oil dropped more than 500,000b/d from June to a five-month low of 1.58mn b/d.

Analysts noted that the July cargoes would have been ordered prior to Trump’s threats, in line with weaker seasonal demand during the South Asian monsoon.

While the drop is more pronounced among Indian state-run refiners, private operators, which account for more than 50 per cent of Russian crude intake, have begun reducing exposure, showing some diversification is under way, analysts said.

India’s intake of US crude has also grown to 225,000 b/d since May, nearly doubling, and with room for adding a further 100,000 b/d in the near term, according to Kpler.

A person familiar with the thinking at Reliance, India’s largest crude refiner that has been a big buyer of Russian oil since 2022, said the group would wait for direction from the Indian government, as it was a “geopolitical issue”.

“Coercing” India to stop importing Russian crude in the absence of a formal universal embargo would increase competition globally, warned DLN Sastri, director of oil refining and marketing at the Federation of Indian Petroleum Industry. “Oil will be available if you pay the price,” he said, but restricting India’s supplies will “affect bottom lines”.

Additional reporting by Tom Wilson in London