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New Delhi: External affairs minister S. Jaishankar on Wednesday (August 20) pressed Russia to address India’s ballooning trade deficit even as Moscow pledged to keep supplying discounted oil despite US tariff threats and said it hoped trilateral talks with India and China would soon resume.

Jaishankar, who is in Moscow to co-chair the 26th session of the Inter-Governmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Cooperation, noted that bilateral trade had risen more than five-fold in four years, from $13 billion in 2021 to $ 68 billion in 2024-25, but that India’s trade deficit with Russia had widened nearly nine times to $58.9 billion.

“So we need to address that urgently,” he said in his opening remarks.

India’s trade with Russia had long remained modest until the Ukraine war, when traditional crude suppliers in West Asia........

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