India is unhappy with the Trump administration’s trade negotiations.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump doubled the tariffs on the South Asian country to 50%.
India already struggled to strike a deal that the Trump White House considered “fair” enough so it faced a 25% rate in reciprocal tariffs.
But in recent days, India’s closeness with Russia also earned it an additional penalty of another 25% tariff. Trump accused India of buying oil and weapons from Russia, which the president labeled a “war machine” for its yearslong conflict with Ukraine.
Earlier this week, India called the tariffs, as well as the penalty, “unjustified and unreasonable.”
Trump has been stern in his responses, but held back from criticizing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi directly.
New Delhi is responding to Washington, D.C., with its own moves.
India reaches out to Russia amid Trump’s tariff
Modi got on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, where the two leaders reaffirmed their commitment to each other and their strategic partnership.
“I look forward to hosting President Putin in India later this year,” Modi added.
India is the world’s second-largest importer of weapons after Ukraine due to the security concerns it faces from its neighbors like Pakistan and China.
Although New Delhi used to depend on Russia’s weapons supply, a shift took place in recent years. Under Modi, India attempted to diversify its suppliers and began importing arms from the West, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute think tank.
Amid the instability surrounding the tariff news, reports suggested New Delhi no longer sought to buy weapons from the U.S. but Indian defense officials called these reports “false and fabricated.”
“It is clarified that the various cases of procurement are being progressed as per the extant procedures,” a Defense Ministry source said.
Future of India-U.S. partnership
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the two countries to resolve their trade issue and said the basis of the U.S.-India partnership is “very solid.”
But could this decades-long allegiance go up in flames?
“We are in a situation now where he is completely upset with India, and the 25 years of effort to build a relationship seems to be going down in 25 hours,” Mukesh Aghi, the president and CEO of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, told Politico. “We need to arrest this in some manner … because the relationship is critical for both nations.”
India’s decision to align closer to Russia after the tiff with Washington, D.C., hasn’t made the situation any easier to untangle. But from New Delhi’s perspective, it was being singled out for doing business with Russia for logistical reasons.
Indian Ministry of External Affairs Randhir Jaiswal argued that India only began importing oil from Russia after “traditional supplies were diverted to Europe after the outbreak of the conflict” before noting the U.S. appreciated this move at the time as it kept the “global energy markets” stable.
The Trump White House is actively engaging with Moscow to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff met with the Russian president in Moscow for three hours on Wednesday but didn’t share many details about his conversation since getting back to Washington, D.C.
As Witkoff chatted with Putin, Trump tried making headway with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders and revealed the possibility of a meeting with Putin in the coming days.