From Nidhi Verma at Reuters: "U.S. President Donald Trump's administration renewed sanctions against Iran last year over its nuclear programme, although some buyers were allowed to continue taking limited volumes of Iranian oil under a six-month waiver.
In May, the United States ended those exemptions and said countries that continued to buy Iranian oil would face sanctions, but India buyers had already begun shifting some of their sourcing away from the Middle East.
India, the world's third-biggest oil importer, bought about 184,000 barrels per day (bpd) oil from the United States over November 2018 to May 2019, compared with about 40,000 bpd in the same period a year earlier, the tanker data obtained from shipping and industry sources showed.
Over this same period, India, which through May was Iran's second-biggest oil client after China, took 48% less oil from Tehran at about 275,000 bpd, the data showed.
"Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said he signed an executive order imposing “hard-hitting” sanctions on Iran that will deny Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his office “and many others” access to financial instruments.
Trump said the new sanctions were in part a response to last week’s downing of a U.S. drone, but would have happened anyway. He said the supreme leader was ultimately responsible for what Trump called “the hostile conduct of the regime.”"
In a blinkered 'still or again' moment, Iran announced that the New Sanctions Closed ‘the Path of Diplomacy’ With the United States.
Mary Chastain at L.I. has the correct summary: "Rouhani and the regime will not back down. I mean, they will not even go to the table with the Trump administration. Over course, they did with President Barack Obama’s administration because those officials bent over backward to accommodate the regime."
