Will Rubio’s Jamnagar Move Permanently Break The Russia-India Oil Axis? | OilPrice.com
Simon Watkins
Simon Watkins is a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for…
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By Simon Watkins – Oct 27, 2026, 5:00 PM CDT
- Reliance Industries is exploring deeper energy cooperation with U.S. companies, including Venezuelan oil, potentially strengthening Washington’s ties with India.
- India’s growing dependence on discounted Russian oil has strained U.S. relations, with tariffs and sanctions complicating broader economic and strategic cooperation.
- Washington hopes to pull India closer to its geopolitical orbit, using energy partnerships to counter China’s influence and potentially weaken Moscow’s ties with New Delhi.
The announcement by India’s largest private refiner Reliance Industries Ltd that it is open to collaborating with U.S. companies across oil, gas and clean energy, including in Venezuela, is a welcome signal to Washington that all is not lost in its ongoing attempts to utilise the Asian subcontinent as a key economic, political and military counterpoint to China’s dominance across the Asia-Pacific region. It also comes at a time when New Delhi has become an increasingly important support mechanism for Russia, both economically and geopolitically.
Back in U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term in office, the move was on to roll out as many relationship normalisation deals between Arab states and Israel (‘Abraham Accords’) as possible. This strategy was to be the cornerstone of Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East, which would advance U.S. interests in the region whilst simultaneously damaging those of China and Russia, as analysed in full in my latest book on the new global oil market order. For this to work most effectively, Trump needed to hold out the carrot of another ‘big bid’ for oil and gas products in Asia to gradually replace China’s dominant buyer status among the Middle Eastern energy producers, and India looked like a great bet. Subsequent data released in the first quarter of 2021 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) showed that India would make up the biggest share of energy demand growth, at 25 percent, over the next two decades, as it overtook the European Union (EU) as the world’s third-biggest energy consumer by 2030. Indeed, India’s energy consumption was expected to nearly double as the nation’s GDP expanded to an estimated USD8.6 trillion by 2040 under its national policy scenario. This was underpinned by a rate of GDP growth that added the equivalent of another Japan to the world economy by 2040, according to the IEA. At the centre of this demand growth remains Reliance Industries’ Jamnagar supersite — the world’s largest single-location refining complex, boasting a capacity of 1.4 million barrels per day. Related: Saudi Aramco Offers Discounted Oil to Europe as Exports Recover
Dovetailing perfectly into this idea were two other factors. The first was that India had shown willingness back on 15 June 2020 to aggressively push back against China’s increasingly aggressive expansion across Asia-Pacific, in line with its multi-generational strategy to usurp the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower, based around its land and maritime ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI), as also fully detailed in my latest book on the new global oil market order. On that date, New Delhi’s military had clashed with those of China in the disputed territory of the Galwan Valley in the Himalayas, reflecting a much greater change in the core relationship between the two countries than the relatively small number of casualties might have implied. The second factor was that the UAE — strongly fancied by the U.S. to become the first main Middle Eastern Arab state to sign up for an Abraham Accord (which it did on 15 September 2020) — already enjoyed an extraordinarily close relationship with India. Multiple major deals in the energy sector had already been done between the two countries, with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s (ADNOC) chief executive officer, Sultan al-Jaber, stating that he looked forward to exploring partnerships with even more Indian companies across the energy giant’s hydrocarbon value chain. He added that he wanted this to include expanding the commercial scale and scope of India’s vitally important strategic petroleum reserves (SPR) partnership, in line with ADNOC being the only overseas company allowed at that stage to hold and store the country’s SPR.
All three elements in this relationship — the U.S., key Middle East states targeted for Abraham Accords, and India — had continued to work well enough until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. At that point, India became a major buyer of heavily discounted Russian oil, despite U.S. and EU sanctions. Nevertheless, India was importing 1.6 million bpd of oil from Russia, while China imported around 1 million bpd and Turkey about 500,000 bpd. As Trump put it back then in a Truth Social post in mid-August 2025: ‘India is not only buying massive amounts of Russian Oil, they are then, for much of the Oil purchased, selling it on the Open Market for big profits… They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine. Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA.’ Consequently, he imposed 50 percent tariffs on Indian goods on 27 August 2025. This was then increased to up to 100 percent under the ‘Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026’ that was signed into law on 18 September this year. However, just two days before the implementation deadline, President Trump issued a sweeping, last-minute presidential waiver on 16 October. Rising energy imports from Russia, despite sanctions, though, were not the only sign of a further deepening in Moscow and New Delhi’s relationship. On 18 February 2025, the two countries signed the ‘Reciprocal Exchange of Logistics Support’ (RELOS) agreement, a deal that quietly extended their military cooperation into Russia’s deeply strategic Arctic ports and the Northern Sea Route, as exclusively analysed at the time by OilPrice.com. This remote region’s Kola Peninsula hosts roughly half of Russia’s fleet of nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines, including 12 strategic nuclear submarines carrying up to 192 nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, plus dozens of cruise-missile and special-purpose nuclear submarines. This means the Arctic operates effectively as Moscow’s second-strike capability if its main domestic nuclear forces are ever destroyed. Beyond its nuclear arsenal, the Russian Arctic is also home to some of the world’s largest untapped reserves of oil, gas, and critical minerals. Politically, India’s involvement with Russia in the Arctic helps to legitimise Moscow’s ambitions in the region, and more broadly signalled that the Kremlin was not isolated, despite rising Western sanctions.
In this context, the latest announcement from Reliance Industries L
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