India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will not attend this week’s annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, as trade negotiations between New Delhi and Washington remain unresolved and US concerns persist over India’s continued imports of Russian oil, Hindustan Times reports.

The Indian delegation will instead be headed by Anuradha Thakur, secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, and will include Reserve Bank of India governor Sanjay Malhotra according to officials familiar with the matter cited by the Times.

Sitharaman’s decision comes against a backdrop of strained trade relations, following Washington’s decision to impose tariffs of up to 50% on certain Indian goods, including a 25% surcharge linked to oil imports from Russia.

While in the US, India’s representatives are expected to take part in discussions with counterparts from the BRICS bloc, the G20 and the G24 group of developing nations, as well as attend a session of the IMF’s Board of Governors.

Commerce minister Piyush Goyal met US trade representative Jamieson Greer in New York last month, seeking to build on what both sides described as improving bilateral ties following a cordial exchange between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump in September.

India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar also held talks with US secretary of state Marco Rubio on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where Washington reportedly reiterated its concerns about India’s reliance on Russian oil.

Yet while both sides have continued negotiations, a final agreement on trade and energy issues remains elusive. Greer said earlier this month that India was adopting a “pragmatic” approach to trade and had begun diversifying its energy sources away from Russia. To this end, in just the last few hours, US President Donald Trump was reported as saying by the BBC that "within a short period of time", India would stop buying Russian crude. Trump called this "a big stop".

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who had himself previously predicted that India would cease its purchases of oil from Russia - incorrectly so given the need for Trump to reiterate the point – gave a press conference presuming Indian support as part of the US targetting Beijing by saying “Make no mistake, this is China versus the world” adding “China is a command and control economy, and we and our allies will neither be commanded nor controlled by “a group of bureaucrats in Beijing.”

He went on to say on CNBC’s Squawkbox that “We're going to be speaking with our European allies...India, and the Asian democracies, and we're going to have a fulsome group response to this because bureaucrats in China cannot manage the supply chain or the manufacturing process for the rest of the world” – at the time presumably unaware of the decision made by India’s finance minister.

As the respected commentator on economics and geopolitics, and Bne Intellinews partner, Arnaud Bertrand said on X: “You've got to laugh at Bessent's audacity (or, maybe, complete delusion). All the countries he says that he wants to enlist against China are, first and foremost, victims of the very same US attack that China is responding to” before adding “Literally asking his victims to condemn someone else for fighting back Good luck rallying that coalition...”