India has turned into 'oil money laundromat for Kremlin': WH trade adviser

New York: A day after claiming that the Ukraine conflict was “Modi’s war”, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has accused India of being an “oil money laundromat for the Kremlin”.

Navarro, Trump administration’s Senior Counsellor for Trade and Manufacturing, in a lengthy thread on X on Thursday, ranted about India’s oil purchases from Russia and New Delhi’s high tariffs.

The 50 per cent tariffs slapped on India by the Trump administration came into effect on Wednesday.

The trade adviser said the 50 per cent tariff — 25 per cent for unfair trade and 25 per cent for national security — was a direct response.

“India’s Big Oil lobby has turned the largest democracy in the world into a massive refining hub and oil money laundromat for the Kremlin,” Navarro claimed.

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He went on to say that Indian refiners buy cheap Russian oil, process it, and export fuels to Europe, Africa, and Asia.

“India now exports over 1 million barrels a day in refined petroleum — more than half the volume of Russian crude it imports. The proceeds flow to India’s politically connected energy titans — and directly into Putin’s war chest,” he claimed.

Navarro said if India, the world’s largest democracy, wants to be “treated like a strategic partner of the US, it needs to act like one”.

The trade adviser said American consumers buy Indian goods while India keeps out US exports through high tariffs and non-tariff barriers.

“India uses our dollars to buy discounted Russian crude. Indian refiners, with their silent Russian partners, refine and flip the black-market oil for big profits on the international market – while Russia pockets hard currency to fund its war on Ukraine,” Navarro said.

He claimed that before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian oil made up “less than one per cent of India’s imports and today it is over 30 per cent — more than 1.5 million barrels a day”.

“This surge isn’t driven by domestic demand — it’s driven by Indian profiteers and carries an added price of blood and devastation in Ukraine,” he alleged.

“While the United States pays to arm Ukraine, India bankrolls Russia even as it slaps some of the world’s highest tariffs on US goods, which in turn punishes American exporters,” he said.

Navarro said the US runs a USD 50-billion trade deficit with India — and New Delhi is using “our dollars to buy Russian oil”.

“They make a killing and Ukrainians die. It doesn’t stop there. India continues to buy Russian weapons — while demanding that US firms transfer sensitive military tech and build plants in India. That’s strategic freeloading,” he said.

Navarro added that while the Joe Biden administration largely looked the other way at this “madness”, Trump is confronting it.

India has called the tariffs imposed by the US “unjustified and unreasonable”.

New Delhi has said that, like any major economy, it will take all necessary measures to safeguard its national interests and economic security.

Navarro’s post was accompanied by pictures with titles such as ‘India-Russia Blood oil trade’, a photo of a chest overflowing with money with ‘Putin’s war chest’ written on it, a photograph of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as a picture of PM Modi sitting in a meditative posture.

The trade adviser’s thread on X comes a day after he alleged that the Ukraine conflict was “Modi’s war”, saying the “road to peace” runs partly “right through New Delhi”.

“So we, everybody in America, loses because of what India is doing. The consumers and businesses and everything lose, and workers lose because India’s high tariffs cost us jobs and factories and income and higher wages, and then the taxpayers lose, because we got to fund Modi’s war,” Navarro said in an interview to Bloomberg on Wednesday.

There was no immediate comment from New Delhi on Navarro’s statement.

Meanwhile, the Democrats House Foreign Affairs Committee has slammed Trump for “singling out” India for its purchases of Russian oil and for not imposing sanctions on the bigger buyer China saying the tariffs imposed on Delhi are sabotaging the bilateral relationship.

“Instead of imposing sanctions on China or others purchasing larger amounts of Russian oil, Trump’s singling out India with tariffs, hurting Americans & sabotaging the US-India relationship in the process. It’s almost like it’s not about Ukraine at all,” it said in a post on X.

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