US gives India 'waiver' to purchase Russian oil as Brent hits $91

The US on Friday granted India a 30-day "waiver" to allow its refiners to buy Russian oil to ease the growing energy supply crisis caused by the American-Israeli war on Iran which has sent the price of Brent crude to $91 a barrel.

The volte-face comes after the US earlier this year imposed sanctions and a crippling 50% tariff on Indian exports as punishment for crude oil purchases from Russia.

Only last month President Donald Trump proclaimed India had agreed to stop imports from Russia, in a shift that he said would help end the war in Ukraine by cutting off funding for Moscow.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the move was a "deliberate short-term measure...to enable oil to keep flowing” into the market, adding the waiver “will not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government”.

A plan mooted earlier in the week to offer US-backed insurance and naval escorts for tankers stuck in the vital Strait of Hormuz has failed to materialise, leaving analysts sceptical about American plans to ease supplies.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Friday said the US military would “escort ships through the straits and get the energy moving again” as soon as it was “reasonable” to do so.

Brent crude gained 6.91% to $91.31 a barrel on Friday, while gas gained 3.8% to €52.70 per kilowatt hour on the Dutch TTF hub amid scepticism as to how the US was going to resolve a bottleneck with more than 200 tankers and other cargo vessels unable to transit the key waterway which accounts for around 20% of global crude shipments.

Iraq and Kuwait have begun cutting production as supplies start to fill storage facilities. Market sentiment wasn't by Trump's demand late on Friday for Iran's "unconditional surrender".

On Thursday, Trump also said he was not worried about rising petrol prices in the US as a result of the war on Iran, saying the military campaign remained his main focus.

“I don’t have any concern about it,” Trump told the Reuters news agency. “They’ll drop very rapidly when this is over, and if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”

According to the American Automobile Association, the average price of petrol in the US has risen by 34 cents in the past week to $3.32 per gallon. Trump falsely claimed in his rambling State of the Union address last week that petrol prices were “now below $2.30 a gallon in most states and in some places, $1.99 a gallon”.

His administration has already enacted a major environmental rollback which is also expected to push the cost of fuel higher, but analysts - and, crucially, American motorists - fear the lack of a clear end objective to his attacks on Iran could result in higher inflation.

Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com