Six months ago, Trump slapped a 25% tariff on India for buying Russian oil. Now India is asking the same administration for permission to buy Russian gas.
The Iran war changed the math overnight.
Not Oil This Time — Gas
Here’s what most coverage is missing: this isn’t about crude oil. India already secured a 30-day waiver on March 5 to buy Russian oil stranded at sea. That was emergency triage. What Reuters reported on March 27 is different — India wants to resume direct LNG purchases from Russia for the first time since the Ukraine invasion began in 2022.
LNG powers India’s electricity grid, its factories, and — through fertiliser production — its food supply chain. Crude keeps cars running. Gas keeps the lights on.
And about 40% of India’s oil imports normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz — now a war zone.
The Tightrope Nobody’s Talking About
Delhi isn’t panicking. It’s manoeuvring. India has 60 days of crude secured. Iran has exempted Indian ships from its Hormuz blockade. Russia can supply through routes that bypass the strait entirely.
But none of that solves the LNG gap. And the US waiver request signals that gap is serious enough for New Delhi to risk the friction it spent all of January 2026 trying to defuse — when it slashed Russian crude purchases under tariff pressure.
The question Washington has to answer: is India hedging or drifting? If the waiver comes through, every energy-hungry Asian economy will be watching. If it doesn’t, expect Delhi and Moscow to quietly build rupee-rouble trade channels that don’t need American permission at all.
Six months from tariff threat to waiver request. That’s how fast a war rewrites the rules.