Kinshasa, August 4th, 2025 (CPA).- The President of the United States of America threatened on Monday to ‘significantly’ increase the 25% customs duties that he plans to impose on products from India, a country that he accuses of buying large quantities of Russian oil, according to the international media. « I am going to significantly increase the customs duties paid by India to the United States. Indians don’t care how many people are killed in Ukraine by the Russian war machine« , has said US President Donald Trump. President Trump had already criticised India for its purchases of Russian hydrocarbons and weapons.
India is the second largest buyer of Russian oil after China. In his message on Monday, Donald Trump accused New Delhi of ‘not only buying large quantities of Russian oil’ but also selling a large proportion of it on international markets ‘to make big profits’. The tariffs scheduled for India are currently 25%. According to the sources, products from dozens of the United States’ trading partners, including the European Union and India, are due to be hit by new taxes from Thursday, in the name of the rebalancing of trade sought by the US President. But Donald Trump had warned that he wanted to impose so-called ‘secondary’ sanctions, i.e. imposed on countries that buy Russian oil in particular, with the aim of drying up this essential source of income for Moscow.
US tariffs are unfair to developing countries’ (Lesotho Trade Minister) Lesotho’s Minister in charge of Trade
Industry, companies Development and Tourism has said on Monday that the US tariff regime is unfair to developing countries such as Lesotho and has dealt a heavy blow to the country’s textile industry, China News Agency reported. ‘Services such as Microsoft licences, for which Lesotho pays millions of dollars every year, have been neglected by Washington’, has said Mokhethi Shelile, Lesotho’s trade minister. He also pointed out that some American goods were entering Lesotho via South Africa and were being erroneously omitted from the import figures. « US tariff policies, which focus on the export and import of goods, have been criticised for neglecting US services exported to the rest of the world. The US economy is mainly based on services« , he has pointed out.