United States President Donald Trump’s additional 25 percent tariff on India for its imports from Russia, saying it is helping fuel Russia’s war in Ukraine, has put the South Asian nation in the highest tier of tariffed nations so far.
While New Delhi and Moscow are old strategic partners with a relationship dating to the Cold War era, and Russia is a major supplier of India’s defence arsenal, Trump’s ire has predominantly been focused on the recent surge in India’s oil imports from its old ally.
India was “Russia’s largest buyer of ENERGY, along with China, at a time when everyone wants Russia to STOP THE KILLING IN UKRAINE – ALL THINGS NOT GOOD!” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on July 30.
On August 19, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that “some of the richest families in India” were the biggest beneficiaries of these imports.
The biggest importer in India of Russian crude oil has been Reliance Industries (RIL), which is led by Asia’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani.
Russian crude comprised a mere 3 percent of RIL’s Jamnagar refinery’s total crude imports in 2021. Since the war in Ukraine, it has shot up to an average of 50 percent in 2025, according to data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) in Amsterdam.
In the first seven months of 2025, the Jamnagar refinery has imported 18.3 million tonnes of crude oil from Russia, a 64 percent year-on-year increase, and worth $8.7bn. RIL’s imports from Russia in the first seven months of 2025 are only 12 percent lower than the total imports in 2024, CREA said. Its methodology can be found here.
That shift has been driven by the price cap on Russian oil products that kicked in on February 5, 2023, Vaibhav Raghunandan, a European Union-Russia analyst at CREA, told Al Jazeera.
“The initial purpose of the price cap was to curtail Russian revenues, while also ensuring security of supply globally,” said Raghunandan. “A lowered price cap is technically supposed to make this oil more attractive for countries like India and China, but restrict Russian revenues.”
RIL did not respond to a detailed list of questions from Al Jazeera.
However, a stagnation of the level of the price cap – it has been at $60 for more than three years now – and a lack of enforcement have blunted its effect, Raghunandan added.
Instead, a shadow fleet – a fleet of hundreds of vessels operated by Russia to evade policing of its exports – has helped ensure that buyers paid higher than the price cap. As recently as January, approximately 83 percent of Russian crude was being transported via these vessels, as per CREA data. In June, that was down to 59 percent.
CREA tracked RIL’s Russian crude oil imports at its Jamnagar refinery and exports, from 2021 to the end of last month, for Al Jazeera.
It found that the Jamnagar refinery has exported $85.9bn of refined products globally from February 2023 till last month. An estimated 42 percent ($36bn) of those exports have gone to countries sanctioning Russia.
A third of their total exports, worth 17 billion euros ($19.7bn), have been to the EU and $6.3bn of oil products to the US, an estimated $2.3bn of which were processed from Russian crude.
The US is the fourth-biggest importer among individual countries, in value terms, from this refinery since the price caps came into effect, topped only by the United Arab Emirates, Australia and Singapore. In volume, the US is the biggest importer from the Jamnagar refinery, having imported 8.4 million tonnes of oil products since the price caps till the end of July 2025.
In 2025, the US imported $1.4bn of oil products from the refinery, a 14 percent year-on-year increase, the third most of any country globally.
US imports from Jamnagar consist mainly of blending components (64 percent), petrol (14 percent) and fuel oils (13 percent).
After RIL, Nayara Energy, which is majority-owned by Russian firms, including Rosneft, the state-owned oil and gas giant, has been a big importer of Russian crude. Its Vadinar refinery, the second-largest private refinery in India after Jamnagar, got, on average, 66 percent of its total crude imports this year from Russia.
In terms of actual volumes, Nayara’s Russian imports amount to a third of what Reliance imports from Russia for its Jamnagar refinery, CREA said.
‘A total sham’
Analysts say it would be simplistic to suggest that India is bearing the cost of the additional tariffs just for the benefit of one company.
“It seems to me that even if most of the profits went to Reliance, the Indian government has found it convenient to continue this trade with Russia, both because the cheaper oil imports helped with India’s current account deficit and also helped send a message of non-alignment,” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she focuses on the interlinkages between economics, finance and security issues.
India has historically sought to demonstrate strategic independence from major powers, refusing to align formally even during the Cold War with either the US or the Soviet Union.
Ajay Srivastava, founder of the Delhi-based Global Trade Research Initiative, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s tariff for India’s import of Russian oil was “a total sham”.
“The whole thing of putting tariffs is a sham when they haven’t called out the biggest importer of Russian oil that is China,” Srivastava said, adding that Trump was “scared to call out China … If tomorrow Trump and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin come to an agreement [over Ukraine], US will find another pretext to put tariffs on India” as the tariffs were driven by other issues including Trump’s frustrations over India not giving into US trade demands.
Reliance, he said, may have profited from the lower crude prices for Russian oil, and the only reason that is under scrutiny is that it is a private firm, and it is human nature to question the wealthy.
Since the price cap kicked in and till the end of last month, 38 percent of US imports of blending components, 4 percent of jet fuel imports and 2 percent of petrol imports have come from the Jamnagar refinery.
Analysts predict some changes in the offing. The EU has put in place a ban on imports of refined petroleum processed from Russian crude, a “significant policy change”, said CREA’s Raghunandan, adding that “if enforced strongly, it will be hugely impactful”. The ban is set to begin in January.
More than half of RIL’s jet fuel exports have been to the EU, and “losing this market would therefore impact their revenues from some products heavier than others. But overall, it will create a significant rethink for their export strategy”, he said.
But RIL in December also signed a 10-year contract with Rosneft, and it is not clear how that would play out with the sanctions.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/22/behind-indias-massive-russian-oil-imports-asias-richest-man?traffic_source=rss
