India, it appears, is the latest scapegoat identified by the Donald Trump administration for its failure to end Russia's war in Ukraine. Mr Trump had previously blamed the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for the invasion of his own country, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for not agreeing to a ceasefire, and the former presidents of the United States of America, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, for allowing the crisis in Ukraine to explode into a war. But even with that track record, recent comments by officials of Mr Trump’s administration blaming India for the continuing war must count as particularly stunning examples of deflection. Peter Navarro, Mr Trump's long-time economic adviser and in many ways the brain behind his tariff wars, has claimed that the road to peace in Ukraine lies through India, suggesting that India's purchase of oil from Russia was responsible for funding Moscow's war. Separately, Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, has described India's import of subsidised Russian oil and its subsequent sale of refined petroleum products to the West as a form of profit-making arbitrage. While they made these comments to justify Mr Trump's hefty 50% tariffs on Indian goods — half of that amount as punishment for buying Russian crude — they
cannot mask the hypocrisy and the absurdity of their arguments.
As the Indian government has repeatedly pointed out, the European Union imports more from Russia than India even today despite cutting trade with Moscow dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. China, not India, is the largest buyer of Russian crude. Yet the EU and China have not faced any punishment from the US. If the idea is to crush Russia's earnings through its exports so that it cannot finance its war with Ukraine, then exempting its principle customers and instead targeting India makes no sense. Mr Bessent has suggested that India was being targeted because while China was buying significant amounts of Russian oil even before the war, India had opportunistically ramped up its imports because Moscow was willing to subsidise crude and then proceeded to profit off the sale of refined petroleum. But if India is guilty of profiting from war, what about Mr Trump’s administration, which is getting Europe to buy American weapons for Ukraine instead of providing them as aid? Mr Trump himself boasted during his re-election campaign that he could end the war in 24 hours, an acknowledgement of what the world knows — the path to peace in Ukraine actually passes through Washington.