Tata Steel, one of India’s largest steel producers, said on Wednesday it had “made a conscious decision to stop doing business with Russia”.
The company, which is also one of the largest steel producers in Europe, said it has a plan to keep its operations to a minimum.
Already “our steel production sites in India, the UK and the Netherlands have supplied alternative raw materials to end dependence on Russia,” it added in a statement, without providing any further details.
Tata Steel is part of Tata Group, one of India’s largest multinational conglomerates.
The announcement comes just days later infosys †INFY†one of India’s largest tech companies, said it has moved its operations out of Russia.
“Given what is going on in the region, we have started to shift all our work from our centers in Russia to our center outside Russia,” Infosys CEO Salil Parekh told reporters. last week.
“We are also providing some assistance in retraining people who are displaced and, as they move to other regions if they can work in some of our locations in Eastern Europe,” he added.
In the past two months, dozens of companies from around the world have suspended, abandoned or scaled down their operations in Russia.
Narrow tyres
The cessation of operations by the Indonesian business giants comes at a time when New Delhi is reportedly ramping up its purchases of Russian oil, which is now traded at a steep discount due to Western sanctions.
Unlike the West, the South Asian country – which has a long-standing relationship with Moscow – Moscow has not imposed any sanctions and abstained this month to remove Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. More than 50% of the country’s military equipment comes from Russia.
While the United States continues to try to rallying the world behind crippling economic sanctions against Moscow, India has also not backed down on purchases of Russian energy oil or gas, defending its position by pointing to Europe’s continued reliance on imports from Russia.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier this month that “India must make its own decisions about how it approaches Russia’s war in Ukraine”.
The top US diplomat noted that “India’s relationship with Russia has evolved over decades, at a time when the United States could not be a partner of India.”
But “times have changed,” Blinken added, and the United States is “able and willing to be a preferred partner of India.”
— Manveena Suri in New Delhi contributed to this report.
