TOI correspondent from Washington: When elite Indian Air Force pilots, including the celebrated Squadron Leader Shivangi Singh, India’s first female Rafale flyer, participated in US-led Red Flag exercises in Alaska at the Elmendorf and Eielson Air Force Bases (AFBs) a year ago, flying half way across the world with a panoply of India’s air assets including Russian-made jets, little could anyone have imagined that Washington would be red-flagging New Delhi for buying oil for Moscow. But here we are: As US President Donald Trump headed out to the very same Elmendorf AFB to meet Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin on Friday, Trump aides left little doubt that India would pay the price if Washington failed to bend Moscow to its whim. “If things don’t go well, then sanctions or secondary tariffs (on India) could go up,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview to Bloomberg TV, setting the stage for New Delhi to be the fall guy, while providing an off-ramp for China, which buys more Russian oil than India does. Maintaining that he’s “not going to get ahead” of the mercurial President, who’s “the best at creating leverage for himself,” Bessent offered a remarkable insight into why western powers are reluctant to punish China: when he asked the leaders at the table at the recent G7 summit in Canada whether they were willing to put a 200 per cent secondary tariff on Beijing, “everybody wanted to see what kind of shoes they were wearing,” a reference to China’s manufacturing might that has the west in a stranglehold. Bessent’s remarks came even as Trump tempered expectation from what will be the Putin’s first visit to America in nearly a decade and the first domestic U.S.–Russia summit since 1988, saying it could just be a prelude to a tri-lateral meeting that will also bring in Ukraine’s leader Voldymyr Zelansky within days. The US President will meet the Russian leader in one-on-one closed-door meeting kicks off at 11:30 am Alaska time, followed by a broader delegation session over a working breakfast at the Elmendorf AFB.