Ukraine isn’t Modi’s war: Navarro’s lies, Trump’s ego and the unravelling of Bharat-US ties

When US President Donald Trump rolled out a red-carpet welcome for Vladimir Putin in Alaska earlier this month—personally escorting his Russian counterpart to a limousine and calling him by his first name—it was meant to signal Washington’s ability to command global stagecraft. During the meeting Putin thanked Trump for helping increase the Russo-American trade by 20 per cent. A few days later, his senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, published a blistering article in the Financial Times, accusing Bharat of “funding Putin’s war machine” by buying Russian crude oil. He called Ukraine “Modi’s war”.

The American hypocrisy is glaring: While the US trades with Russia, it’s projected as a commercial exercise; when Bharat takes a similar path, it is accused of indulging in blood money. The most dramatic casualty of this misplaced strategy has been Bharat-US ties, painstakingly built over 25 years of bipartisan diplomacy.

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The central argument of Navarro’s attack has been that Bharat’s imports of Russian crude, which were 1 per cent of the country’s total oil purchases before the Ukraine war, now constitute more than 30 per cent. According to him, these transactions directly finance Russia’s war in Ukraine. What Navarro mischievously leaves out is context: Bharat, like nearly every energy-dependent economy, buys from the cheapest supplier to safeguard its domestic interests. After February 2022, Russian crude became available at steep discounts, making it an obvious choice for the country seeking affordable energy for its 1.4 billion citizens.

This, however, isn’t the entire story.

In 2024, well into the second year of the Ukraine war, the United States itself imported over $3 billion worth of Russian goods. In many products such as urea, palladium, and potassium, Russia was one of the top two suppliers to the US. And as Putin conceded in Alaska, the US-Russia trade has increased by 20 per cent in the past six months. As for its closest ally, the European Union, it imported $39 billion in Russian products during the same period, of which $24 billion consisted of fuel alone. And China—which faces no comparable scrutiny from the Trump administration—imported $94.3 billion worth of Russian fuel between 2021 and 2025, nearly double Bharat’s $57.46 billion. If the goal were truly to “punish Russia’s enablers”, China and the EU would rank ahead of Bharat by orders of magnitude.

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While Navarro has called Ukraine “Modi’s war”, the fact remains that Bharat has nothing to do with this conflict. At the heart of the Ukraine crisis lies Russia’s enduring fear of encirclement by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato). The US-led Nato’s expansion into eastern Europe has been a longstanding point of contention with Moscow.

Even George Kennan, America’s foremost Russia strategist and architect of the Cold War containment doctrine, called Nato’s eastward expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold-War era”, predicting it would provoke “nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion”.

The Ukraine war is fundamentally the making of undue Western ambition and folly. Blaming Bharat, thus, is a silly excuse. For Delhi, buying discounted Russian oil is not about geopolitics; it is about ensuring an affordable, uninterrupted energy supply. Those who say Bharat is profiteering out of the Russian crude oil simplistically discount the fact that this singular act has kept the global oil price in check, thus helping the average consumer across the world, and not just the subcontinent.

The Trump administration’s selective outrage, however, cannot be dismissed as a policy misstep. It reflects a deeper malaise: Trump’s egotistical personality coupled with his overreliance on ‘yes-man’ advisers. Among them, Navarro stands out, not only for his combative style but also for his history of deceit and deception.

After all, he is the same person who cited in at least five of his 13 books the insights of a supposed Harvard-trained economist named Ron Vara, portrayed as a China hawk dispensing warnings about trade deficits, supply chains, and Beijing’s growing influence. Vara’s insights, presented as gospel, bolstered Navarro’s calls for tariffs as a panacea for all economic ills.

Lo and behold, Ron Vara never existed in reality and was a figment of Navarro’s wild, duplicitous imagination!

As The New York Times reported, Navarro invented him—the name itself an anagram of Navarro’s own surname. Vara was a fiction, designed to masquerade as an expert source lending weight to Navarro’s ideology. When confronted, Navarro dismissed the fabrication as a “Hitchcockian writing device” and an “inside joke”. But this is no harmless joke. As Professor Tessa Morris-Suzuki, the academic who exposed the ruse, put it: “It’s very strange for an academic to insert fictional experts into books presented as factual. This undermines academic and policy credibility.”

Ironically, what should have pushed Navarro into disgrace has now become a state policy under Trump 2.0. According to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Trump’s sweeping tariffs—which disrupted global supply chains and alienated allies—stemmed partly from a “fake memo” attributed to Vara. Navarro invented an expert, wrote a memo citing that expert, and Trump built tariff policy around it. Now the same Navarro, with the same penchant for distortion, is driving the White House’s public confrontation with New Delhi.

Given the barrage of assaults, finding one excuse or another to criticise Bharat, Navarro seems to act like a disgruntled uncle in a Hindu wedding—an archetypal Fufajee of the Hindi heartland—who would constantly crib for no particular reason, but his accusations are more than political theatre; they have chilling economic and strategic consequences. Trump’s administration has already imposed 50 per cent on Bharat’s exports, a move that disproportionately targets New Delhi while letting Beijing off relatively lightly.

In recent years, bipartisan consensus in Washington supported elevating the Bharat-US relationship to its full potential. From Bill Clinton’s historic outreach in 2000 to George W Bush’s landmark civil nuclear deal in 2007 to Barack Obama’s embrace of Bharat as a “lynchpin of Asian security”, this partnership was painstakingly nurtured across administrations.

That legacy is now under threat from Trump’s erratic policy shifts. In Bharat, anti-American sentiment is growing rapidly. Washington is increasingly being perceived as a haughty, unreliable, and inconsistent nation. This growing mistrust has accelerated Bharat’s diversification strategy—expanding energy cooperation with Russia, boosting trade ties with China, looking for newer markets for its products, and forging new partnerships across the Indo-Pacific.

If Washington continues on this path, it risks isolating itself from the world’s largest democracy and fastest-growing major economy. Washington must recognise that public shaming, punitive tariffs, and accusatory rhetoric cannot help build partnership, especially with a civilisational state like Bharat with a population of 1.4 billion people. They are the tools of alienation.

If Trump continues to rely on advisers like Navarro—a proven manipulator who once invented an “expert” to validate his theories and now advances the fiction that Ukraine is “Modi’s war”—the damage to Bharat-US relations could be lasting and irreversible. What was once hailed as the “defining partnership of the 21st century” risks becoming a casualty of political hubris. To repair the damage, Washington must undertake an immediate course correction: Replace distortions with dialogue, respect Delhi’s strategic compulsions, and recognise shared interests and values.

Given the way things are currently moving, this doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. Without such a reset, the United States risks losing Bharat’s trust—and with it, its strategic foothold in an increasingly contested Asia. This might hurt American geostrategic interest in the long term.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.