The US might be disappointed, but India’s oil imports have always been driven by market conditions, and neither American nor Venezuelan oil is likely to replace Russian oil at scale anytime soon.
India might "slowly" decouple however, depending on how long the war drags on, it might be "death by slow bleed" for Russia. Not to mention, BRICS is over.
«India’s oil imports have always been driven by market conditions»
As in the previous comments the $61.6 billions RF trade surplus with India is similar to the COMECON arrangements of the USSR: the RSFSR sent valuable oil, gas, materials, manufactures to Ukraine, Cuba, the stans, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. and Cuba etc. paid in "barter" with sugarcane and low value commodities and shoddy products; pretty much only the DDR, Czechslovakia and Hungary paid for their very-low-price imports from the RSFSR with stuff of some usefulness.
Apart from the plan of Chubais and Gaidar etc. to destroy the USSR to pinochetize Russia many russian politicians and economists wanted to get rid of the COMECON countries and most stans because they thought they exploited the RSFSR with the excuse of one-way-only "socialist solidarity".
One of the funniest outcomes of the clever imposition by the CIA+USAID+NED+etc. of largely expatriate-dual-citizens elites on ex-soviet and COMECON states is that they have lost all the huge subsidies the RSFSR gave them and are paying top dollars to the USA and their arab vassals instead.
Once I had a comical discussion with a typical polish blogger:
* He pointed out Poland had physically destroyed the soviet pipelines from the RF and instead built a very expensive LNG terminal for imports of LNG by ship from the USA at several time the price per BTU.
* He claimed that this was worth it as it made Poland far more independent because it could no longer be blackmailed with a cut of supplies from the RF.
* I pointed out that Poland would have been more independent if it had both RF pipelines and USA LNG terminal, as the USA could cut LNG supplies by simply rerouting the LNG ships to other customers which was much cheaper than shutting down a pipeline supply, and any such action would destroy the polish economy.
* He paused for a while and then wrote that he had never thought about that. :-)
I was therefore very amused to read recently that the native polish political class seems to have realized the problem and are trying to fix it:
«One source close to President Nawrocki also told Business Insider that he hopes to avoid natural gas altogether. “The president’s goal is for us not to make a hasty transition by replacing coal with gas, but to immediately switch from coal to nuclear power. For the head of state, stability is paramount, as it is not just an economic issue but also a component of national security.” Wojciech Dąbrowski, former president of the Polish Energy Group under PiS, pointed to the risks of gas reliance. “Some point to gas, but it’s a fuel highly susceptible to various geopolitical turmoils. This must not be forgotten, as we don’t have sufficient gas resources of our own and must import about 80 percent of it. Therefore, gas can only be a useful supplement.”»
Hahahahaha! "gas, but it’s a fuel highly susceptible to various geopolitical turmoils". Too funny to read after their spending a fortune to become totally dependent on USA LNG sales. If polish voters and the other eastern europeans had any common sense they would have tarred and feathered the expatriate-dual-citizen politicians "sponsored" by the CIA+USAID+NED+etc. and chosen instead to be a fully neutral buffer between NATO and the RF like Austria or Finland under Kekkonen or to be partially vassals of the RF (which is much weaker as a suzerain than the USA) and get benefits from both sides.
But again the USA governments "deep state" is rich, powerful, run by very clever and patient and ruthless operatives, and offers a very good deal to the upper-middle-class and the upper-class of vassals (entirely at the expense of the lower-middle-class, the working-class and the under-class) and it is difficult to avoid vassalization to it.
«the RSFSR sent valuable oil, gas, materials, manufactures to Ukraine, Cuba, the stans, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. and Cuba etc. paid in "barter" with sugarcane and low value commodities and shoddy products»
Also the dutiful and legalistic RF government continued selling for real cheap oil and gas to the fascist ukrainian government after May 2014 and even for quite a while after February 2022 because "it is not a war" and "sanctity of contracts" and even paid transit fees to them for cheap supplies to Germany (of which the ukrainian fascists siphoned off a large part) etc. in the name of "brotherly slavic relations" (BTW I wonder about the current arrangements for the ammonia pipelines).
«India’s oil imports have always been driven by market conditions»
Not even remotely by "market conditions" but thanks to the generosity of the RF that supplies oil to India pretty much for charity:
* As in a previous comment of mine RF exports to India were worth $66.4 billions and imports $4.8 billion and that is key thing.
* Obviously most of the RF export to India are oil and obviously India must pay for the vast majority of them in currency because the RF has a trade surplus of $61.6 billion with India.
* The problem is that since the RF is off SWIFT and all dollar transfers must go through the Federal Reserve so India cannot pay the RF those $61.6 billions in dollars that the RF can use to buy stuff on the global markets.
* So indian companies pay RF suppliers in rupees which can only be used to buy indian stuff and Indian has so few things to sell that the RF only imports $4.8b a year from India.
"Russia has tackled the issue of billions of rupees accumulated in Indian banks through investments in Indian stocks and infrastructure schemes"
The enormous accumulation of rupees is one reason why the RF government wants to get a million indian "guest workers" so their remittances to their families and savings accounts in India will use up a chunk of the rupee surplus (again India cannot export much to RF except workers).
Of course the indian government is going to do whatever it can to continue importing russian oil it can pay with freshly minted rupees instead of importing venezuelan oil for which it must earn and pay dollars to the USA government.
Oil is so 2008. The most important global commodity is LNG and Qatar and America dominate the LNG market. America and Qatar are clearly happy to work together to maximize America’s leverage via the LNG market. Putin built pipelines when he should have invested in LNG export infrastructure….oops. 😉
Yeah, China in 2008 was really the last Olympics that everyone watched and that elevated a nation at the global level. Now the IOC is only awarding the Olympics to cities that have held them before with the infrastructure mostly built because otherwise they are huge money pits. As usual China wins and everyone else loses.
India is a paper tiger and will fold whenever the US wants a , large reason for this is due to the information below.
" The Indian diaspora sends a very large amount of money back to India every year in the form of remittances — often the largest in the world. These remittances are transfers from Indians working or living abroad to family, relatives, and businesses in India.
💰 Recent Annual Remittance Figures
In the fiscal year 2024–25, Indians abroad **sent about ** $135.46 billion back to India, a record high according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and financial data.
In calendar year 2023, India received around $125 billion in remittances, according to World Bank-linked estimates.
For 2024 (World Bank estimates), inward remittances were around $129 billion.
📊 Context
India is consistently the top recipient country in the world for remittance inflows.
These amounts represent money sent by members of the Indian diaspora (tens of millions of people worldwide) back to India.
Remittances play a significant role in household incomes and foreign exchange reserves in India. "
If true, India is not a big fat turkey but a smart grocer.
One can ask himself if BRICS country leaders have not understood that Trump is a narcissist pathologic. For a narcissist, reality don't matter. Perhaps they understood that with this kind of psycho, you just have to say "yes" and "wonderful" "genius" to do finally what you want to do.
The narcissist will be satisfied by this "yes" and will not want to ear and see that his interlocutors do the contrary of what they promised. The narcissist will also not ear folks who could tell him that he has been fooled. He only allows flatterers around him.
So, it takes time before he corrects the situation. The time that his narcissism forget the previous claim of victory.
So, his interlocuteurs win a few months.
Ex: few months ago, Trump claimed USA erased all nuke possibility for Iran.
Today he say he must eradicate the Iran nuke possibility.
And the best is that his narcissism prevent him to be humiliated by this fooling. At the contrary, it offers him a new "victory" to win
For the sociopath (which includes most business and political leaders), facts, logic, evidence and morality are of interest, solely to the extent that they can be weaponized.
You may find Professor Harry Frankfurt's noble essay "On Bullshit" to be most instructive.
Consider what would happen if Macron or his advisers did not believe what they were required to believe.
For the sociopath, all this is just a question of what hoops must I jump through? If tomorrow, France were to be taken over by North Koreans, a Macron would be a passionate advocate of Juche. If the week after that it were to be Islamicists, Macron would convert.
How do you want to make a good evaluation of your force and that of your ennemies if you believe in your own propaganda.
In WW2, when Staline's men, in summer 41, said "everything is in accordance with the plan" they knew they was lying. Imagine the disaster if they had begin to believe that everything was in accordance with plan".
What is proper to a psycho is the loss of reality. A psycho can lead a country but loose every time his wars against wise leaders.
Japaneses, in 1941, repeated so much time that American were weak cowards that they ended in believing that. Deadly mistake.
In 41 to, Germans had so repeated that soviets were dumb backwards with no industry and USSR would collapse quickly that they finished to believe it and the generals who called for caution were mocked .
Idem for Napoleon with Russians in 1812. He didn't even listen his closest adviser, Caulaincourt who predicted in front of him all that will happen.
There are thousands exemples in history.
Remind the old roman sentence: " Jupiter drives mad those he want to destroy".
Or even before, the Bible "God blinds his understanding to hasten his downfall.”
India might "slowly" decouple however, depending on how long the war drags on, it might be "death by slow bleed" for Russia. Not to mention, BRICS is over.
«India’s oil imports have always been driven by market conditions»
As in the previous comments the $61.6 billions RF trade surplus with India is similar to the COMECON arrangements of the USSR: the RSFSR sent valuable oil, gas, materials, manufactures to Ukraine, Cuba, the stans, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. and Cuba etc. paid in "barter" with sugarcane and low value commodities and shoddy products; pretty much only the DDR, Czechslovakia and Hungary paid for their very-low-price imports from the RSFSR with stuff of some usefulness.
Apart from the plan of Chubais and Gaidar etc. to destroy the USSR to pinochetize Russia many russian politicians and economists wanted to get rid of the COMECON countries and most stans because they thought they exploited the RSFSR with the excuse of one-way-only "socialist solidarity".
One of the funniest outcomes of the clever imposition by the CIA+USAID+NED+etc. of largely expatriate-dual-citizens elites on ex-soviet and COMECON states is that they have lost all the huge subsidies the RSFSR gave them and are paying top dollars to the USA and their arab vassals instead.
Once I had a comical discussion with a typical polish blogger:
* He pointed out Poland had physically destroyed the soviet pipelines from the RF and instead built a very expensive LNG terminal for imports of LNG by ship from the USA at several time the price per BTU.
* He claimed that this was worth it as it made Poland far more independent because it could no longer be blackmailed with a cut of supplies from the RF.
* I pointed out that Poland would have been more independent if it had both RF pipelines and USA LNG terminal, as the USA could cut LNG supplies by simply rerouting the LNG ships to other customers which was much cheaper than shutting down a pipeline supply, and any such action would destroy the polish economy.
* He paused for a while and then wrote that he had never thought about that. :-)
I was therefore very amused to read recently that the native polish political class seems to have realized the problem and are trying to fix it:
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/polish-president-pushes-aggressive-move-nuclear-bypassing-lng-amidst-geopolitical-turmoils
«One source close to President Nawrocki also told Business Insider that he hopes to avoid natural gas altogether. “The president’s goal is for us not to make a hasty transition by replacing coal with gas, but to immediately switch from coal to nuclear power. For the head of state, stability is paramount, as it is not just an economic issue but also a component of national security.” Wojciech Dąbrowski, former president of the Polish Energy Group under PiS, pointed to the risks of gas reliance. “Some point to gas, but it’s a fuel highly susceptible to various geopolitical turmoils. This must not be forgotten, as we don’t have sufficient gas resources of our own and must import about 80 percent of it. Therefore, gas can only be a useful supplement.”»
Hahahahaha! "gas, but it’s a fuel highly susceptible to various geopolitical turmoils". Too funny to read after their spending a fortune to become totally dependent on USA LNG sales. If polish voters and the other eastern europeans had any common sense they would have tarred and feathered the expatriate-dual-citizen politicians "sponsored" by the CIA+USAID+NED+etc. and chosen instead to be a fully neutral buffer between NATO and the RF like Austria or Finland under Kekkonen or to be partially vassals of the RF (which is much weaker as a suzerain than the USA) and get benefits from both sides.
But again the USA governments "deep state" is rich, powerful, run by very clever and patient and ruthless operatives, and offers a very good deal to the upper-middle-class and the upper-class of vassals (entirely at the expense of the lower-middle-class, the working-class and the under-class) and it is difficult to avoid vassalization to it.
«the RSFSR sent valuable oil, gas, materials, manufactures to Ukraine, Cuba, the stans, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. and Cuba etc. paid in "barter" with sugarcane and low value commodities and shoddy products»
Also the dutiful and legalistic RF government continued selling for real cheap oil and gas to the fascist ukrainian government after May 2014 and even for quite a while after February 2022 because "it is not a war" and "sanctity of contracts" and even paid transit fees to them for cheap supplies to Germany (of which the ukrainian fascists siphoned off a large part) etc. in the name of "brotherly slavic relations" (BTW I wonder about the current arrangements for the ammonia pipelines).
«India’s oil imports have always been driven by market conditions»
Not even remotely by "market conditions" but thanks to the generosity of the RF that supplies oil to India pretty much for charity:
* As in a previous comment of mine RF exports to India were worth $66.4 billions and imports $4.8 billion and that is key thing.
* Obviously most of the RF export to India are oil and obviously India must pay for the vast majority of them in currency because the RF has a trade surplus of $61.6 billion with India.
* The problem is that since the RF is off SWIFT and all dollar transfers must go through the Federal Reserve so India cannot pay the RF those $61.6 billions in dollars that the RF can use to buy stuff on the global markets.
* So indian companies pay RF suppliers in rupees which can only be used to buy indian stuff and Indian has so few things to sell that the RF only imports $4.8b a year from India.
https://economymiddleeast.com/news/over-90-percent-of-russia-india-trade-now-settled-in-roubles-and-rupees/
"Over 90 percent of Russia-India trade now settled in Roubles and Rupees"
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/russia-tackles-accumulation-of-rupees-through-investments-101714911069752.html
"Russia has tackled the issue of billions of rupees accumulated in Indian banks through investments in Indian stocks and infrastructure schemes"
The enormous accumulation of rupees is one reason why the RF government wants to get a million indian "guest workers" so their remittances to their families and savings accounts in India will use up a chunk of the rupee surplus (again India cannot export much to RF except workers).
Of course the indian government is going to do whatever it can to continue importing russian oil it can pay with freshly minted rupees instead of importing venezuelan oil for which it must earn and pay dollars to the USA government.
It will be very difficult for India to sell out Russia.
Oil is so 2008. The most important global commodity is LNG and Qatar and America dominate the LNG market. America and Qatar are clearly happy to work together to maximize America’s leverage via the LNG market. Putin built pipelines when he should have invested in LNG export infrastructure….oops. 😉
He also wasted billions on the Sochi Olympics, which could have been used to further modernize the Russian military. Putin is a world class idiot.
" The 2014 Winter Olympics, held from February 7–23 in
Sochi, Russia, were the first Winter Games hosted by the Russian Federation and the most expensive in history at $51 billion. "
Yeah, China in 2008 was really the last Olympics that everyone watched and that elevated a nation at the global level. Now the IOC is only awarding the Olympics to cities that have held them before with the infrastructure mostly built because otherwise they are huge money pits. As usual China wins and everyone else loses.
The only logical explanation for why Modi would even entertain a worse deal from the US is blackmail and coercive pressure.
His name being mentioned in Epstein‘s emails is all you need to know.
Expect more damaging materials to surface if Modi does not comply.
India is a paper tiger and will fold whenever the US wants a , large reason for this is due to the information below.
" The Indian diaspora sends a very large amount of money back to India every year in the form of remittances — often the largest in the world. These remittances are transfers from Indians working or living abroad to family, relatives, and businesses in India.
💰 Recent Annual Remittance Figures
In the fiscal year 2024–25, Indians abroad **sent about ** $135.46 billion back to India, a record high according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and financial data.
In calendar year 2023, India received around $125 billion in remittances, according to World Bank-linked estimates.
For 2024 (World Bank estimates), inward remittances were around $129 billion.
📊 Context
India is consistently the top recipient country in the world for remittance inflows.
These amounts represent money sent by members of the Indian diaspora (tens of millions of people worldwide) back to India.
Remittances play a significant role in household incomes and foreign exchange reserves in India. "
Thank you Andrew.
If true, India is not a big fat turkey but a smart grocer.
One can ask himself if BRICS country leaders have not understood that Trump is a narcissist pathologic. For a narcissist, reality don't matter. Perhaps they understood that with this kind of psycho, you just have to say "yes" and "wonderful" "genius" to do finally what you want to do.
The narcissist will be satisfied by this "yes" and will not want to ear and see that his interlocutors do the contrary of what they promised. The narcissist will also not ear folks who could tell him that he has been fooled. He only allows flatterers around him.
So, it takes time before he corrects the situation. The time that his narcissism forget the previous claim of victory.
So, his interlocuteurs win a few months.
Ex: few months ago, Trump claimed USA erased all nuke possibility for Iran.
Today he say he must eradicate the Iran nuke possibility.
And the best is that his narcissism prevent him to be humiliated by this fooling. At the contrary, it offers him a new "victory" to win
For the sociopath (which includes most business and political leaders), facts, logic, evidence and morality are of interest, solely to the extent that they can be weaponized.
You may find Professor Harry Frankfurt's noble essay "On Bullshit" to be most instructive.
Perhaps but it's not what I'm talking about.
You can lie, cheat, throwing piles of bullshit but it's absolutely necessary that you don't believe in the own shit you throw.
When you begin to believe your own lie, you loose reality. And reality is very harsh when you mess with it
I am not sure that a Trump believes any of it. Certainly a Macron or a Netanyahu does not.
I ask the question.
In listening the Macron's advisers, I'm sure that he believe, at least, at his bullshits about Russia.
I don't enough know Trump or Netanyahu to assert anything.
Consider what would happen if Macron or his advisers did not believe what they were required to believe.
For the sociopath, all this is just a question of what hoops must I jump through? If tomorrow, France were to be taken over by North Koreans, a Macron would be a passionate advocate of Juche. If the week after that it were to be Islamicists, Macron would convert.
You speak ideology, I speak reality.
How do you want to make a good evaluation of your force and that of your ennemies if you believe in your own propaganda.
In WW2, when Staline's men, in summer 41, said "everything is in accordance with the plan" they knew they was lying. Imagine the disaster if they had begin to believe that everything was in accordance with plan".
What is proper to a psycho is the loss of reality. A psycho can lead a country but loose every time his wars against wise leaders.
Japaneses, in 1941, repeated so much time that American were weak cowards that they ended in believing that. Deadly mistake.
In 41 to, Germans had so repeated that soviets were dumb backwards with no industry and USSR would collapse quickly that they finished to believe it and the generals who called for caution were mocked .
Idem for Napoleon with Russians in 1812. He didn't even listen his closest adviser, Caulaincourt who predicted in front of him all that will happen.
There are thousands exemples in history.
Remind the old roman sentence: " Jupiter drives mad those he want to destroy".
Or even before, the Bible "God blinds his understanding to hasten his downfall.”