NEW DELHI — India’s largest purchaser of Russian oil, Reliance Industries, said on Thursday that it has stopped importing crude oil from Russia to refine for export amid looming U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Moscow’s energy sector.
In a statement, a Reliance Industries spokesperson said that, as of Thursday, the company has stopped importing Russian crude oil to its Jamnagar refinery complex in the western state of Gujarat. From Dec 1., all product exports from its complex will be “obtained from non-Russian crude oil,” the spokesperson added.
The announcement could mark a significant concession on an issue that has complicated U.S.-India trade negotiations and damaged diplomatic ties. In August, President Donald Trump levied a 25 percent tariff on New Delhi as a penalty for purchasing Russian oil, bringing tariffs on the country to 50 percent — among the highest rates in the world. The president’s senior advisers repeatedly criticized India, referring to Russia’s war with Ukraine as Indian Prime Minister Narendra “Modi’s war.”
Trump told trade negotiators in recent months that India would have to reduce its Russian oil purchases before a trade deal with the United States could be reached, but Indian officials were hesitant to publicly commit to such a course of action for fear of domestic backlash.
In a statement to The Washington Post on Thursday, the White House press office said it “views this decision by Reliance to comply with sanctions, and broader movements by India to diversify away from Russian crude purchases, as a step in the right direction. We welcome this shift and look forward to advancing meaningful progress on US-India trade talks.”
The Reliance conglomerate is owned by Mukesh Ambani, a Modi ally and Asia’s richest man. The company has purchased at least $33 billion in Russian oil since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, accounting for nearly 8 percent of Moscow’s entire crude oil sales during that period, a Post investigation found.
Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert and nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, said the commitment to stopping Russian oil buys from one of India’s “key energy players” was a “significant” gesture to Washington.
“Reliance’s decision could be one of the last factors that gets the two sides to the finish line in the trade talks,” he said.
Before the conflict in Ukraine, Reliance bought very little Russian oil. But when the Group of Seven and the European Union moved to cap the price of the commodity at $60 per barrel — an attempt to slow President Vladimir Putin’s war machine — Western countries encouraged India to buy the discounted oil to keep markets stable.
“We’re happy to have India get that bargain,” then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in November 2022.
Reliance’s purchases of Russian oil soared from $85 million in 2021 to $5.5 billion in 2022, The Post found. Purchases peaked in 2023, at $11.7 billion, before dipping to $9.8 billion in 2024. From Jan. 1 to Aug. 12 of this year, the company’s Russian oil buys totaled $6.2 billion, the data showed.
Late last year, Reliance inked a 10-year deal with Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, which agreed to provide 500,000 barrels of crude per day in an agreement valued at $13 billion annually. In October, frustrated by stalled peace talks in Ukraine, Trump imposed sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, another Russian energy giant. The E.U., meanwhile, announced it was tightening its own sanctions on Rosneft and other state oil producers.
Reliance said in its statement that “this transition has been completed ahead of schedule to ensure full compliance with product-import restrictions.”
In the short term, Reliance may have to turn to the Middle East, and potentially the U.S., Kugelman said, to replace the Russian oil it has refined for export.
“Its immediate challenge is filling such a large gap so quickly,” he said. “It’s a pretty big blow.”
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