‘India is coming in’: Trump says New Delhi will buy oil from Venezuela, ‘concept of the deal’ in place

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One while flying to Palm Beach in Florida on Saturday, Trump made the remarks while responding to a question on whether China would recover money it had lent to Venezuela in exchange for oil supplies. After US forces captured Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro in early January, Trump had said that Washington would take control of Caracas’s oil sector and that American majors would pump in billions of dollars to revive the struggling Venezuelan oil industry and fix its broken oil infrastructure. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, but accounts for less than 1 per cent of global production. 

“China is welcome to come in and would make a great deal of oil. We welcome China. We’ve already made a deal. India is coming in, and they’re going to be buying Venezuelan oil as opposed to buying it from Iran. So we’ve already made that deal, the concept of the deal,” Trump said.

Notably, though, India has not imported any Iranian crude for nearly seven years now, following the re-imposition of US sanctions on Tehran during the first Trump presidency. There has been some speculation on the likelihood of Iranian oil coming back to the international market in case of a regime change in Tehran following Iran’s recent widespread civil unrest.

Meanwhile, India has not allocated any funding in this year’s budget for the Chabahar port in Iran, as it faces challenges from the US in developing the port. In the last few years, India has been making an annual outlay of Rs 100 crore to the mega connectivity project in the Sistan-Balochistan province in Iran’s southern coast. It has got a waiver till April and is engaged with the US on its extension.

The story of India’s oil imports from Venezuela, however, is different from Iran. India — specifically private sector refining giant Reliance Industries (RIL) — was a regular buyer of Venezuelan crude prior to the imposition of US sanctions on Caracas in 2019. Following the sanctions, oil imports from Venezuela stopped within a few months. As per India’s official trade data, Caracas was New Delhi’s fifth-largest supplier of oil in 2019, providing close to 16 million tonnes of crude to Indian refiners. The bilateral trade between India and Venezuela was $6.40 billion in 2019-20, of which Indian imports—primarily crude oil—were worth $6.06 billion.

VIDEO | Florida: US President Donald Trump says, "China is welcome to come in and make a great deal on oil. India is coming in and they're going to be buying Venezuelan oil as opposed to buying it from Iran. So we've already made that deal, the concept of the deal. But China is… pic.twitter.com/u0vLLCuBnM

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) February 1, 2026

Then in October 2023, the US eased sanctions on Venezuela’s petroleum sector, authorising oil exports without limitation for six months. This led to RIL and a few other Indian refiners restarting oil imports from Venezuela. But imports then stopped as the sanction waiver was not extended by Washington after its understanding with Caracas on the conduct of free and fair presidential elections in Venezuela broke down.

A few months later, RIL was able to restart Venezuelan oil imports after obtaining a sanctions waiver from the US. But in the summer of 2025, the company halted oil imports from Venezuela after the Trump administration threatened higher tariffs on countries buying Venezuelan crude. No Venezuelan oil has been imported into India for months now.

In India, private sector behemoth Reliance Industries (RIL) and Nayara Energy (NEL) have been the biggest processors of heavy crudes, the kind which Venezuela produces. Limited heavy crude volumes are also processed occasionally by a few public sector refineries like Indian Oil’s Paradip refinery and Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals (MRPL) unit in Mangaluru. HPCL-Mittal Energy (HMEL), a joint venture of public sector refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL) and Mittal Energy, also processes heavy crudes from time to time, and so do a few other Indian refineries.

According to a recent note by commodity market analytics firm Kpler, planned investments aimed at increasing refinery complexity—such as upgrades at HPCL’s Visakhapatnam and a few other refineries—could expand India’s ability to process Venezuelan heavy crudes, gradually broadening system-wide intake capacity. Till then, any Venezuelan supply coming to India would largely support only a few Indian refineries, “constraining aggregate intake potential despite improved availability”.

The imposition of US sanctions on Venezuela and the consequent crash in India’s Venezuelan oil imports led to bilateral trade between New Delhi and Caracas plummeting. It was $1.27 billion in 2020-21 (India’s imports were $714 million), $424 million in 2021-2022 (India’s imports were $89 million), and $431 million in 2022-2023 (Indian imports were $253 million).

On January 30, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke with Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodriguez and the two leaders agreed to take the bilateral relations to new heights in the years ahead. The phone call from Rodriguez to Modi was the first since the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife by the United States in the first week of January. Energy was one of the topics covered in the leaders’ conversation. The Ministry of External Affairs had said in a statement that the two leaders agreed to further expand and deepen the India-Venezuela partnership in all areas, including trade and investment, energy, digital technology, health, agriculture and people-to-people ties.

“Both leaders exchanged views on various regional and global issues of mutual interest and underscored the importance of their close cooperation for the Global South,” the MEA had said.

Trump’s comments come against the backdrop of US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela and its pressure on major energy-importing countries to avoid buying crude from countries sanctioned by Washington.

In recent years, India significantly increased its purchases of discounted Russian crude, making Russia one of its largest oil suppliers. In 2025, the Trump administration imposed tariffs totalling 50% tariffs on India, including a 25% penal levy over India’s hefty Russian oil imports.

Experts also believe that Venezuelan crude offers India a politically acceptable diversification option amid American pressure on India’s Russian oil imports. Any increase in Venezuelan crude imports is also expected to increase India’s negotiating leverage with its traditional West Asian oil suppliers.