India-Russia Relations (PSIR Optional)

India’s relationship with Russia survived every systemic change of the last seventy years — the Sino-Soviet split, the collapse of the state it was built with, unipolarity, India’s opening to the West, and a European war that made Russia a pariah in half the world. It is also the relationship most visibly eroding, and the two facts are connected. Continuity here rests partly on conviction and partly on inertia. The honest question is whether what remains is an achievement being renewed or an inheritance being spent.

The Shape of the Relationship

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• Four elements have carried the relationship, and they are of very unequal health today.
  • A path-dependent weapons relationship — an inventory built over six decades that generates its own demand for spares, overhauls, training and industrial contracts. This is the strongest pillar and the most strained.
  • A shared commitment to a multipolar order, meaning in practice a world in which neither American nor Chinese preferences are decisive. This survives, but the two now read multipolarity differently.
  • Counterbalancing dangerous neighbours — the original strategic logic, which worked when Moscow could weigh against China and Pakistan, and which has been hollowed out by Russia’s dependence on Beijing.
  • A shared wariness of the United States, once deep on both sides and now sharply asymmetric: India’s most consequential new partnership is with Washington, with which Russia is in open confrontation.
• The structural reading is neoclassical realist rather than sentimental. States in a self-help order seek external balance when internal balance is insufficient. India in the 1960s could not match China and Pakistan alone, and the Soviet Union wanted a South Asian partner that constrained both Chinese and American influence.
  • The relationship was built by a threat environment, not by affection, and it changes as that environment changes.

“New Delhi’s sentimental attachment to the Moscow relationship has steadily been replaced by a sense of realism about the two countries’ increasingly divergent regional and global trajectories.”

— C. Raja Mohan

• Three functions still make Russia difficult to replace, and any assessment that ignores them is incomplete: it sustains the majority of India’s existing military inventory; it supplies discounted crude at a scale no other producer offers; and it holds a veto in the Security Council that has never once been used against India.
• Three developments make its future weight uncertain: Russia’s economic and technological subordination to China, the exposure of Russian defence production to wartime demand and sanctions, and the sheer asymmetry of Russia’s economy, which is now smaller than India’s.

Foundations: The Soviet Decades

An intellectual encounter before a diplomatic one

• Jawaharlal Nehru visited Moscow in November 1927 with his father, on the tenth anniversary of the revolution, and wrote of it in Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions. The visit shaped a generation of Indian thinking about planned industrialisation and about a large agrarian society modernising outside the capitalist world.
  • What he took from it was economic method rather than political ideology. Nehru rejected the single-party state and the coercion of the Soviet model while admiring its capacity to industrialise a backward economy quickly.
• The relationship began badly after 1947. Stalin’s Soviet Union read Indian independence as a transfer of power between elites and Indian non-alignment as concealed alignment with the imperial camp; the Communist Party of India’s insurrectionary line of 1948 reflected that judgement.
• The turn came after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev and Bulganin recast India as the most valuable postcolonial state in Asia — populous, stable, uncommitted, and capable of leading an anti-colonial bloc. For India, the Soviet Union offered capital goods, defence equipment and diplomatic cover without the conditions the West attached.

1955 and the industrial partnership

• The exchange of visits in 1955 is the hinge of the early relationship. Nehru travelled to the Soviet Union in June; Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev came to India in November and December, drawing enormous crowds and, at Srinagar, publicly endorsing the Indian position on Kashmir.
• The Bhilai steel plant, agreed in 1955, was the concrete outcome and the template. Bokaro and Visakhapatnam followed, along with heavy machine-building, mining, oil exploration and pharmaceutical capacity.
  • The political significance exceeded the tonnage. Soviet assistance made the public-sector heavy-industry model of the Second Five Year Plan feasible when Western capital was unavailable on acceptable terms.
  • Rupee-rouble trade let India buy capital goods and defence equipment without spending convertible currency, paying instead in tea, textiles and pharmaceuticals — an enormous benefit to a foreign-exchange-constrained economy, and in time a distortion that insulated Indian exporters from competition.
• Oil and space followed the same pattern. Soviet geologists helped establish the Oil and Natural Gas Commission’s early exploration capacity, and the launch of Aryabhata in 1975 on a Soviet vehicle, followed by Rakesh Sharma’s flight in 1984, gave India a space relationship a decade before any Western equivalent.

Kashmir, the veto and the diplomatic pattern

• The Soviet Security Council veto on Kashmir was the single most valuable diplomatic asset India acquired. The first came in 1957, blocking a resolution contemplating a plebiscite and an international presence, and the pattern repeated in 1962 and again during the 1971 war.
• The reciprocal Indian pattern was silence. India abstained or voted with Moscow through the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a record that non-alignment’s critics have used ever since to argue that Indian non-alignment was selectively applied.
• Both sides understood it as an exchange: India obtained protection on its central territorial question, and the Soviet Union obtained the most respected voice in the non-aligned world declining to condemn it.

The realist counter-history

The received Indian account of the Soviet relationship is one of unbroken solidarity. It does not survive contact with the record, and the corrective matters because the same instinct — treating the relationship as a friendship rather than a transaction — still shapes Indian expectations of Moscow.

• Srinath Raghavan’s argument is that the idyllic account is a myth, and that Moscow read India through the prism of its own interests at every point.
  • In 1962 the Soviet Union did not back India. Facing the Cuban missile crisis and unwilling to break finally with Beijing, Moscow urged restraint, held up MiG-21 deliveries and shared intelligence with China. Support hardened only after the war, once the Sino-Soviet rupture was complete.
  • In 1965 Moscow pressed India to withdraw from the territory it held and convened the parties at Tashkent in January 1966, where Kosygin mediated as an even-handed broker rather than as India’s partner.
  • After the Cold War the transactional logic became explicit: Russia has approached India primarily as a buyer, and has priced access accordingly.
• The Soviet Union also pursued Pakistan when it suited, supplying limited arms in 1968 and abandoning the effort only when Pakistan’s alignment with China and the United States hardened.
• The conclusion is not that the relationship was worthless. It is that it was always interest-driven, that India obtained a great deal from it, and that expecting sentiment to deliver what interest no longer supports is the characteristic Indian error in this relationship.

1971 and the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation

• The treaty was produced by a triangle, not by a friendship. Three developments converged between 1969 and 1971 and made a formal instrument attractive to both capitals.
  • The Sino-Soviet split turned violent at the Ussuri river in March 1969, giving Moscow a hard security interest in a large state on China’s southern flank.
  • Henry Kissinger’s secret journey to Beijing in July 1971, routed through Pakistan, announced a Sino-American opening that left India facing a hostile alignment of Washington, Beijing and Islamabad.
  • The East Pakistan crisis was already producing a refugee inflow of roughly ten million people, and Indian planners judged that military action would come.
• The Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation was signed on 9 August 1971 for twenty years, negotiated on a Soviet draft that had been available since 1969 and which India had declined until the Beijing opening changed its calculation.
  • Article IX is the operative clause and it is narrower than the popular account. Each party undertook not to assist any third party in an armed conflict against the other, and to enter into mutual consultations to remove any threat if either were attacked. It is a consultation clause, not a mutual-defence guarantee.
  • Article IV contained the reciprocal political undertaking that mattered to Moscow: respect for each other’s policies of non-alignment and of peaceful coexistence respectively.
• What it delivered in December 1971 was real. The Soviet Union vetoed ceasefire resolutions at the Security Council which would have frozen the military situation before Dhaka fell, and deployed naval units into the Indian Ocean as the American Task Force 74, built around the carrier Enterprise, entered the Bay of Bengal.
• The domestic and diplomatic criticism was immediate and has never entirely gone away. Critics argued that a treaty with a superpower was incompatible with non-alignment and converted India into a Soviet client.
  • India’s answer had two parts: the treaty contained no basing rights, no obligation to fight and no alignment against any named state; and non-alignment had never meant equidistance in the face of an actual threat.
  • The most durable defence is functional: the treaty deterred Chinese intervention and constrained American options at the decisive moment, and nothing else available in 1971 would have done either.

Strains before the collapse

• The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was the sharpest test. India abstained on the General Assembly resolution calling for withdrawal and its representative offered a formulation accepting the Soviet account of having been invited — a position widely read abroad as endorsement and privately regretted in Delhi.
  • The cost was concrete: it damaged India’s standing in the non-aligned and Islamic worlds at precisely the moment Pakistan became the front-line state receiving American arms.
• Gorbachev’s arrival changed the tone without changing the structure. He visited India in November 1986 and signed the Delhi Declaration on Principles for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free and Non-Violent World with Rajiv Gandhi — an ambitious statement of disarmament principle that neither state’s later conduct honoured.
• The rupee-rouble system was already accumulating problems — an artificial exchange rate, an export basket that never had to become competitive, and a debt whose valuation would become a live quarrel the moment the rouble was convertible.

The Collapse and the Lost Decade

What happened to the Soviet state

• The Soviet collapse is the single largest external shock India’s foreign policy has absorbed, and its mechanics are worth stating precisely because Indian assumptions about Russian capacity are still calibrated to the Union rather than to the Federation.
  • Glasnost, the opening of public discussion, and perestroika, the restructuring of economy and polity, were intended to renew the system. Their combined effect was to remove the Communist Party as the integrative force binding the union without putting a functioning market or a federal bargain in its place.
  • The economic result was catastrophic: central planning suspended before a market existed, producing inflation, shortages and collapsing output.
  • The Sinatra Doctrine — the abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine and the decision to let Eastern European states “do it their way” — meant Moscow did not intervene as its allied regimes fell in 1989 and 1990.
  • External pressure compounded internal decay: the Strategic Defence Initiative of 1983 drew the Soviet Union into an arms race its economy could not fund, and exclusion from globalised trade and finance widened the gap in living standards that cultural contact then made visible.
• The Russian Federation that emerged was a different state — an economy that contracted by roughly half in the 1990s, a military-industrial complex without orders, and a foreign policy oriented, at first, entirely westward.

The near-abandonment, 1991–1996

• Andrei Kozyrev’s foreign ministry treated integration with the West as the organising objective, and India as a legacy commitment of little value. Indian officials of that generation describe the period as the moment the relationship’s supposed permanence was disproved.
• Trade collapsed. The rupee-rouble mechanism disintegrated, Soviet-era counterpart institutions vanished, and the two governments spent years quarrelling over the valuation of Indian debt contracted at an administered exchange rate — settled eventually on terms that left both sides dissatisfied.
• Spares stopped arriving. Indian serviceability rates for Soviet-origin aircraft, tanks and ships fell sharply as suppliers scattered across a dozen newly independent states, including much of the shipbuilding and engine capacity that ended up in Ukraine.
• The cryogenic engine episode of 1992–93 is the formative Indian memory of the decade. Glavkosmos had contracted to supply cryogenic engines and the technology to build them to the Indian Space Research Organisation; the United States invoked the Missile Technology Control Regime and sanctioned both agencies, and Russia complied by cancelling the technology transfer while delivering only finished engines.
  • India built the capability itself, flying an indigenous cryogenic stage successfully in 2014 after two decades of effort.
  • The lesson Indian planners drew was about dependence itself — that a supplier under external pressure will protect its own equities first, a lesson now applied to Russian and Western suppliers alike.

Primakov, multipolarity and the recovery

• The turn came in January 1996 when Yevgeny Primakov replaced Kozyrev. A career intelligence officer and Arabist, Primakov argued that Russia’s interest lay in a multipolar world rather than in junior partnership with Washington, and that Asia — India and China in particular — was where Russian weight could be recovered.
• NATO’s enlargement and its 1999 air campaign over Kosovo hardened this reading, converting a doctrinal preference into a settled Russian grievance about American use of force without Security Council authority.
• Primakov proposed a Russia–India–China “strategic triangle” in Delhi in December 1998, the origin of the RIC format. India was initially cool: it had no interest in an anti-American bloc and had just conducted nuclear tests citing China as a justification.
• The recovery was built by summit exchanges through the middle and late 1990s. President Boris Yeltsin’s visit of January 1993 produced the successor treaty; Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao’s Moscow visit of mid-1994 restored the assurance of continued arms supply and was followed in December by a cluster of agreements on military-technical cooperation, shipping and investment protection; and the Yeltsin-era summit exchange of 1997 continued the pattern, with Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov’s Delhi visit of December 1998 completing it.
  • These were episodic meetings, not an institution. Each was negotiated on its own terms, each depended on the political weather in Moscow, and there was no obligation on either side to meet again. The annual summit mechanism did not exist until 2000, and that distinction is the whole significance of what followed.
• The 1993 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation replaced the 1971 instrument on Yeltsin’s visit, and the substantive point is what it left out: it carries no security clause and no equivalent of Article IX. The legal relationship after 1993 is a framework for cooperation, not a strategic undertaking.

Rebuilding the Architecture

The Declaration on Strategic Partnership, October 2000

• Vladimir Putin’s first visit to India in October 2000 produced the Declaration on Strategic Partnership, and its importance is procedural rather than rhetorical. It committed the two heads of government to meet every year, alternating between capitals, and built a standing structure of ministerial and official consultation beneath that meeting.
  • India has this arrangement with only two states, Russia and Japan. It converts the relationship from a matter of political will into a calendar obligation, which is precisely why it has survived periods when the political will was thin.
• The Indian domestic consensus behind it is unusual. No significant political formation opposes the Russian relationship; it is one of the few foreign-policy questions on which government and opposition have never seriously diverged.
• “Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership” was adopted in December 2010 during Dmitry Medvedev’s visit — a formulation India uses for no other country, and one whose inflation over time is itself evidence of a relationship that needed reassurance.

The machinery beneath the summit

• The India–Russia Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Cooperation (IRIGC-TEC), created in 1994, is the civilian workhorse, co-chaired by the External Affairs Minister and a Russian Deputy Prime Minister.
• A separate Intergovernmental Commission on Military and Military-Technical Cooperation (IRIGC-M&MTC) handles defence, co-chaired by the two defence ministers; its 22nd session met in New Delhi on 4 December 2025, immediately before the summit.
• A 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue of foreign and defence ministers was created in 2021, the format India also runs with the United States, Japan and Australia — an equalising gesture at a moment when the relationship needed one.
• Sub-national and sectoral tracks were added to widen a relationship that had been almost entirely government-to-government: an India–Russia Business Forum, region-to-state partnerships such as Astrakhan with Gujarat and Samara with Karnataka, and a Forum of Regions. Two new Indian Consulates General, at Yekaterinburg and Kazan, were announced in 2025.

The summit series and its interruptions

• The 2022 lapse is the most revealing entry in the table. A mechanism designed to be automatic skipped 2020 to the pandemic and then 2022 and 2023 because neither capital could manage the optics — the value of institutionalisation, and its limit.

The 23rd Annual Summit, 5 December 2025

• Putin’s visit of 4–5 December 2025 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Strategic Partnership and produced a joint statement titled “Russia–India: A Time-Tested Progressive Partnership, Anchored in Trust and Mutual Respect.”
• The economic centrepiece was the Programme for the Development of Strategic Areas of Russian–Indian Economic Cooperation till 2030, an attempt to give the US$100 billion trade target a sectoral work plan rather than leaving it as an aspiration.
• The document list was unusually wide, and its width is the point: almost every item addresses a weakness rather than a strength.
  • Two agreements on people: one on the temporary labour activity of citizens of one state in the territory of the other, opening a regulated channel for Indian workers in Russian construction, agriculture and manufacturing; and one on combating irregular migration, responding to the recruitment of Indian nationals into Russian military service under false pretences.
  • A roadmap for science, technology and innovation cooperation and a memorandum on climate change and low-carbon development.
  • A memorandum on the training of specialists for ships operating in polar waters, and a maritime cooperation agreement covering shipping, ports and joint mineral exploration — both aimed at the Arctic.
  • A programme of cooperation in the Russian Far East for 2024–2029, and agreement to deepen the INSTC, the Chennai–Vladivostok Eastern Maritime Corridor and the Northern Sea Route.
  • On nuclear energy, agreement to accelerate discussion of VVER reactors of Russian design, to localise equipment manufacture in India, and to formalise a second reactor site beyond Kudankulam.
  • On defence, a commitment to joint manufacture in India of spare parts and components for Russian-origin equipment under Make in India — the single most practically important defence commitment in the document, because spares rather than platforms are where the dependence bites.
• Russia restated support for India’s permanent membership of a reformed Security Council, for India’s BRICS chairship, and for an Indian SCO Civilizational Dialogue Forum.
• What the summit omitted is as informative as what it contained: no new platform contract, no fix for payments, and no movement on the trade imbalance beyond a target and a work plan.

“India and Russia have been among the steadiest big relationships in the world. This visit in many ways was about reimagining the relationship, building dimensions and facets it lacked.”

— S. Jaishankar

Defence: The Deepest Pillar and the One Under Most Strain

Why path dependence is the right concept

• The defence relationship is not a series of purchases but an installed system, which is why it changes slowly even when both parties want otherwise.
  • Spares and overhauls for tanks, aircraft, submarines and air-defence systems already in service must come from the original design bureau or from licensed production.
  • Training pipelines, maintenance doctrine, simulators and manuals are built around Russian equipment across three services.
  • Industrial interests on both sides — licensed production lines at Indian public-sector plants, and Russian enterprises dependent on Indian orders — lobby for continuity.
  • Price and access were the original attractions: cheaper than Western equivalents, available without political conditions, and offered with licensed production when no Western supplier would transfer anything.
• Two capabilities are usually forgotten in this list. Russian remote-sensing and satellite cooperation gave Indian forces an early independent surveillance capacity, and GLONASS access provided a positioning alternative to the American GPS at a time when GPS availability in a crisis could not be assumed — a concern rooted in the Kargil experience.
• India remains the world’s second-largest arms importer, at about 8.2% of global imports in 2021–25.

The inventory

The S-400 and the American objection

• The S-400 is the acquisition that made Indian defence dependence a problem in a third country’s politics. The intergovernmental agreement was signed at the Goa summit in October 2016 and the contract for five squadrons at about US$5.43 billion was concluded in October 2018.
• India’s stated reasoning was capability and cost: a long-range, layered system covering approaches from both Pakistan and China, at a price and delivery schedule no Western supplier matched, negotiated before the American sanctions statute existed.
• The system has been used. Indian officials credited it with a significant air-defence role during the May 2025 hostilities with Pakistan, which settled the domestic argument about whether the purchase was worth its diplomatic cost.
• The American instrument was the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, and sanctions were never imposed on India — an outcome secured by successive administrations declining to use the statute’s discretion against a partner they were courting. The Act as an American instrument, and the 2025 secondary tariff that applied its logic through trade law, are treated with the subject of India–US relations.
• The precedent India watched was Turkey, sanctioned under the same statute for the same system and expelled from the F-35 programme. The Indian read was that the deeper American objection is operational rather than legal: an S-400 inside an Indian air-defence network constrains what advanced American platforms can be offered.
• Deliveries became a casualty of the war. The last two squadrons slipped repeatedly as Russian production was absorbed by its own front, with completion pushed into 2026 — a demonstration that supplier reliability, not sanctions, is now the binding constraint.

The declining share

• The share is falling for four separate reasons, and conflating them produces bad analysis.
  • Deliberate diversification toward France, Israel and the United States, driven by capability gaps and by a preference for not being dependent on one supplier.
  • Indigenisation, which reduces imports of every origin and is the stated objective of Indian procurement policy.
  • Russian supply failure since 2022, as wartime demand, component shortages and sanctions on the Russian defence industry lengthened delivery timelines.
  • A composition effect: the falling share measures new acquisitions, while the installed base remains overwhelmingly Russian. India’s dependence is far greater than the import share suggests.
• India’s forward orders confirm the direction: a large multi-role fighter requirement being pursued with France, six conventional submarines from a German-Indian partnership, and the 26 Rafale-M contract signed in April 2025.
  • Russia’s competing offers — additional S-400 units and licensed production of the Su-57 — stayed live through 2025–26 without becoming contracts.

Co-development, and what it has actually delivered

• BrahMos is the model both sides cite and the exception that proves the rule. The joint venture created in 1998 produced a system in service across the Indian armed forces and, in January 2022, India’s first major defence export order — about US$375 million to the Philippines, with deliveries from April 2024 and further batches since.
  • It inverted the relationship: a Russian-origin technology partnership made India a defence exporter, and further export interest across Southeast Asia has followed.
  • Its significance for the analysis is that it is nearly unique. The fifth-generation fighter programme collapsed when India withdrew in 2018 after a decade of disagreement over cost, workshare and technology access; the Ka-226T never entered production; and no comparable joint programme has replaced them.
• The Reciprocal Exchange of Logistics Support agreement, signed in Moscow on 18 February 2025, gives each side access to the other’s military facilities for refuelling, replenishment and port calls, with ceilings on personnel and platforms, on a five-year renewable term. Russia ratified it in December 2025; Indian ratification is what makes it operative.
  • Its significance is contested and should be reported as contested. It completes India’s set of logistics arrangements with major partners; sceptics note that Indian warships already called at Russian ports without it and that it formalises existing practice more than it creates new capability.
• The exercise relationship is thin by comparison with India’s Western ones. INDRA is the principal engagement; Indian exercises with the United States, France, Japan and Australia are more frequent, larger and far more focused on interoperability.

Misconceptions or facts

• The proposition that Indo-Russian differences rest on misconception rather than fact can be argued both ways, and the honest answer distinguishes irritants from structural change.
• The case that the differences were exaggerated.
  • The MMRCA outcome of 2011, in which the MiG-35 was not shortlisted and the contract eventually went to Rafale, was a competitive technical evaluation rather than a political rebuff, though Moscow read it as one. Ambassador Alexander Kadakin’s public complaints — that Russian fighters could deal with Rafales, and that India got a joint cruise-missile programme from Russia and no comparable technology transfer from the United States — expressed injured expectation rather than a change of Indian policy.
  • The Vikramaditya dispute was commercial. The delay and the cost escalation on the rebuilt carrier were real, and Navy Chief Suresh Mehta publicly questioned the relationship in 2007, but the ship was delivered in 2013 and became the fleet’s centrepiece.
  • Russia continued to supply what no one else would: a nuclear submarine on lease, licensed production of tanks and rifles, and a long-range air-defence system, at moments when Western suppliers offered neither.
• The case that the differences are structural, which is now the stronger case.
  • Russia’s alignment with China is not a misconception and cannot be negotiated away by better communication.
  • Russia’s engagement with Pakistan, though small, is a change from the Soviet pattern of exclusivity.
  • Delivery reliability has become a genuine operational risk, not a perception problem.
  • India’s diversification is policy, not pique, and it will continue whatever Moscow does.

Energy: The Pillar That Replaced the Others

Civil nuclear cooperation

• Russia is the only country that built nuclear power reactors in India through the decades of technology denial, and that history is the origin of the relationship’s most durable civilian project.
• The intergovernmental agreement for Kudankulam was signed in November 1988 by Rajiv Gandhi and Gorbachev, suspended after the Soviet collapse, and revived by a supplementary agreement in 1998 — concluded despite the post-Pokhran sanctions environment and grandfathered against later supply-group rules on the argument that it predated them.
• The plant is India’s largest nuclear station, planned for six VVER-1000 reactors of 1,000 MW each at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.
  • Units 1 and 2 are commissioned and operating, Unit 1 from 2013 and Unit 2 from 2016.
  • Units 3 to 6 are under construction, with Unit 3 in its commissioning phase during 2026 and operation expected thereafter. The programme is many years behind its original schedule, for reasons ranging from local protest at the site to payment and supply-chain disruption after 2022.
• The nuclear liability question was the largest legal obstacle and it has now been removed. The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010 created a supplier’s right of recourse that no foreign vendor would accept, and which Russian negotiators argued did not apply to Kudankulam’s earlier units.
  • The SHANTI Act — Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India — was passed in December 2025 and received assent on 20 December 2025, replacing both the Atomic Energy Act of 1962 and the 2010 liability law, introducing a graded liability framework and opening the sector to private participation.
  • This is a genuine unlock for Russian, French and American vendors alike, and it reframes the 2025 summit’s commitment to accelerate VVER discussions and to identify a second reactor site as a live commercial prospect rather than a diplomatic formula. India’s stated target is 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047, which cannot be met domestically.
• Cooperation extends beyond reactors — to natural uranium extraction, fuel fabrication, waste management, and Russian-designed plants in third countries. Russia also trained India’s Gaganyaan astronaut-designates at its cosmonaut centre.

Upstream investment: the two-way stake

• Indian public-sector energy firms hold some of their largest overseas assets in Russia, an exposure that predates the war and complicates any policy of disengagement.
  • Sakhalin-1, where ONGC Videsh holds a 20% stake acquired for well over two billion dollars, its single largest foreign investment.
  • Vankor and Taas-Yuryakh in eastern Siberia, where Indian consortia acquired significant minority stakes in 2016, and a 15% holding in a Rosneft unit purchased in 2015.
  • Cumulative Indian investment in Russian hydrocarbons runs to roughly US$15 billion, complicated since 2022 by Russian re-registration decrees and by difficulty in repatriating dividends.
• The flow runs the other way too, and this is the more consequential half. Rosneft led the acquisition of Essar Oil in 2017, now Nayara Energy, with its Vadinar refinery and a national retail network — the largest single foreign investment ever made in India.
  • The European Union sanctioned Nayara in July 2025, and the consequences ran into Indian territory: an Indian asset employing Indian workers, sanctioned by a third party for its ownership, forced to reconfigure its trading and shipping arrangements.
  • This is the sharpest available illustration of secondary sanctions as an intrusion into Indian domestic economic policy, and Indian officials treated it as such.
  • Rosneft signalled a further commitment of over US$25 billion to Indian refining and retail infrastructure around the 2025 summit — an investment that would deepen exactly the exposure sanctions target.

The crude surge after 2022

• Before February 2022 Russian crude was about 2% of India’s imports. Within a year it was the largest single source, peaking around 40–44% of Indian imports in mid-2024 and averaging roughly 1.7 million barrels a day through 2025.
• The arithmetic explains the policy. India imports close to 88% of the crude it consumes; a discount of several dollars a barrel on a third of five million barrels a day is a macroeconomic quantity, affecting the current account, the exchange rate and domestic inflation simultaneously.
• India’s public defence has three parts: its per-capita energy consumption is a fraction of that of the states urging restraint; European purchases of Russian energy continued for years after the invasion; and a developing economy cannot absorb a price shock for a conflict it is not party to. Indian refiners add that keeping Russian barrels on the market restrained the global price.
• The October 2025 designation of Rosneft and Lukoil by the United States, with a wind-down deadline in November, was the first measure that actually moved Indian volumes. Private refiners complied, Russia’s share of Indian imports fell below a quarter for the first time in two years between December 2025 and February 2026, and buying shifted to West Asia and the United States.
• A limited American waiver from March 2026, subsequently extended, allowed a partial recovery, and Russia remained India’s largest single crude supplier through early 2026. Volumes moved; the stated Indian principle did not.

Payments: the unglamorous constraint

• Sanctions on Russian banks broke the settlement layer, and no durable replacement has been built.
  • Special rupee vostro accounts, permitted from July 2022, let Russian banks hold rupees in Indian banks — and produced the predictable problem: Russia accumulated rupee balances it could not spend, because India does not export enough for Russia to buy.
  • Settlement migrated to the dirham and then substantially to the Chinese yuan, which is an uncomfortable outcome for India: an attempt to preserve autonomy from the dollar ended by increasing the role of a currency managed in Beijing.
  • Partial workarounds — allowing rupee balances to be invested in Indian government securities and corporate instruments, and the discussion of national payment-card and messaging linkages — have reduced the friction without removing it.
• The payments problem is not a technicality. It caps how large the trade relationship can grow and pushes both sides toward instruments with their own strategic costs.

Trade, Connectivity and the Imbalance

The record total and what it conceals

• Bilateral trade reached a record US$68.69 billion in FY2025-26, against a figure that sat below US$15 billion for most of the previous decade — a transformation in size and none at all in structure.
• The composition is the analytical point. Indian exports have remained in the range of US$4–5 billion a year, led by pharmaceuticals, organic chemicals, machinery and electrical equipment, while imports are dominated by crude oil, with fertiliser and coal next.
• The revised targets are US$100 billion in trade and US$50 billion in mutual investment by 2030, and the arithmetic of reaching them without further inflating the deficit is not obvious.

• Three constraints explain the imbalance, and only one of them is political.
  • Logistics and distance. There is no efficient corridor; goods move by long sea routes or through congested land transit, and the freight and insurance penalty is decisive for low-margin manufactures. China, the European Union and the United States face no equivalent friction in trading with India.
  • Market access and standards, which the India–EAEU free trade negotiation is intended to address.
  • Payments and banking risk, which deters exactly the small and medium Indian exporters the relationship needs.
• The India–EAEU free trade negotiation is the main instrument for rebalancing. A joint study group reported in 2016 and the project then lay dormant for years; terms of reference were signed in Moscow in August 2025 with an eighteen-month work plan, and rounds through 2026 have focused on goods and non-tariff barriers, with services and investment to follow.
  • The bloc is Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, and India runs a surplus with every member except Russia — which is precisely why the negotiation matters more for principle than for arithmetic.
• A structural weakness runs through all of it: the relationship has been conducted between governments and state enterprises, and the two private sectors barely know each other. Joint ventures in heavy machinery, fertiliser and pharmaceuticals are attempts to change that, with modest results.

Connectivity as the intended solution

• The International North–South Transport Corridor, agreed by India, Iran and Russia in 2000 and expanded since, is the flagship: a multimodal route from Mumbai to Bandar Abbas by sea, north through Iran and across the Caspian to Russia and onward to Europe.
  • Its promise is a route to Russia and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan, with transit-time and cost savings that trials have demonstrated.
  • Its problem is Iran: the Iranian segment, including India’s Chabahar terminal, depends on sanctions exemptions, and missing rail links inside Iran have never been financed.
• The Chennai–Vladivostok Eastern Maritime Corridor cuts the sea route to the Russian Far East from around forty days to roughly twenty-four, and is the maritime complement to India’s Act Far East policy, launched by Modi at Vladivostok in 2019 with a US$1 billion line of credit — the first such credit India extended to a developed economy, aimed at coking coal, timber, diamonds and hydrocarbons.
• The Arctic is the newest and most speculative track. India released its Arctic Policy in 2022, holds observer status on the Arctic Council since 2013, operates the Himadri research station at Svalbard, and has begun cooperating on the Northern Sea Route — training Indian seafarers for polar navigation, shipbuilding and repair, and cargo trials.
  • India wants a shorter Europe route and a stake in Arctic resources; Russia wants traffic for a route Western shippers have abandoned. Both are long-horizon bets far from commercial scale.

The Structural Problem: Russia’s Turn to China

• The single most consequential development for India is one it does not control: Russia’s growing dependence on China. The relationship India built to balance China now runs through Beijing.
• The “no limits” joint statement of 4 February 2022, issued days before the invasion, declared a partnership with “no forbidden areas of cooperation.” Whatever the phrase meant in Chinese and Russian usage, it announced an alignment India had spent decades trying to prevent.
• Dependence deepened after 2022 in four measurable ways.
  • Trade reoriented: China became the destination for a large share of Russian energy exports and the source of the machinery, electronics and dual-use components Western sanctions cut off.
  • Payments reoriented: much Russian trade, including with India, now settles in yuan.
  • The military flow reversed in places. Russia has helped China build a missile early-warning system, while Chinese components have become important to Russian production.
  • Political dependence: Russia needs Chinese diplomatic cover, and Putin has declined to rule out a formal alliance.
• The consequence for India is precise and should be stated precisely. Russia’s usefulness as a counterweight to China has been hollowed out. Moscow will not press Beijing on the Line of Actual Control, will not supply India with anything China objects to strongly enough, and cannot be relied upon in a serious India–China crisis.
  • The counter-argument deserves weight. Russia is not a Chinese vassal: it retains an independent nuclear arsenal, a permanent Security Council seat, vast resources and its own reading of its interests, and Russian planners are visibly uncomfortable with the asymmetry. A Russia entirely absorbed into China’s orbit is worse for India than the present arrangement, which is the strongest argument for continued Indian engagement.
• Russia and Pakistan is a real change from Soviet exclusivity and a small one. The Druzhba military exercises have run since 2016 and continued through 2025; a Pakistan Stream gas pipeline agreement was signed in 2021 and has not been built; and limited equipment sales have occurred. The volume is trivial beside the Indian relationship, and inflating it is a common analytical error — but the symbolism is not trivial, because Moscow now positions itself as an even-handed South Asian actor rather than as India’s partner.
• Afghanistan is where India and Russia have diverged longest. Moscow engaged the Taliban years before the American withdrawal, hosted the Moscow Format, and recognised the Taliban government in July 2025 — the first state to do so — while India moved from non-recognition to a technical presence and expanding engagement without recognition.
• Russia’s position on the Indo-Pacific is openly hostile to India’s. Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly characterised the Indo-Pacific construct and the Quad as Western devices for drawing India into anti-China alignment.

“India is an object of the Western countries’ persistent, aggressive and devious policy… to engage in anti-China games by promoting Indo-Pacific strategies.”

— Sergei Lavrov

• India’s answer has been to ignore the objection and continue. It has expanded Quad participation while maintaining the Russian relationship, on the reasoning that it is Chinese hegemony in Asia, not American power, that threatens India — and that American weakness, in capability or in will, would hurt India more than American strength.
• Russia’s positioning during the May 2025 India–Pakistan hostilities showed the new balance exactly. Putin condemned the Pahalgam attack unambiguously and offered counter-terrorism solidarity, while Moscow urged dialogue between the two capitals, invoking the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration.
  • Solidarity on terrorism, even-handedness on the conflict — a posture no Soviet government would have adopted.

Ukraine and Indian Diplomacy

• The 2014 precedent set the template. Russia’s incorporation of Crimea in March 2014 after a referendum caused genuine misgivings in New Delhi, and India said almost nothing publicly — declining to condemn, declining to endorse, and citing legitimate Russian interests while restating respect for sovereignty.
  • The reticence had a concrete cause: India had defence-industrial interests in both Russia and Ukraine, Ukraine being a major supplier of engines, gas turbines and overhaul services for Soviet-origin equipment. The 2022 position was not improvised; it was the 2014 position at a much higher price.
• India’s position is not neutrality and should not be described as neutrality. It is abstention accompanied by stated principles, and the difference is what makes it defensible and what makes it vulnerable.
• Its components are consistent across four years: abstention on substantive resolutions; repeated invocation of the UN Charter, sovereignty and territorial integrity; insistence that there is no military solution and that dialogue and diplomacy are the only path; humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, including medicines and generators; refusal to join sanctions; expanded energy purchases; and leader-level engagement with both capitals.

• The Samarkand exchange of September 2022 is the most misquoted moment in this record. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, before cameras and seated opposite Putin, Modi said:

“Today’s era is not an era of war, and I have spoken to you on the phone about this.”

— Narendra Modi

• What that was, and what it was not. It was a public rebuke delivered to Putin’s face by a leader Russia counts as a friend, and it was quoted at the G20 and written into the New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration of September 2023 as language China and Russia could accept. It was not a criticism of the decision to invade, it named no aggressor, and it changed no Indian vote. Accounts that describe it as India condemning the invasion misread it.
• The two visits of 2024 defined the method. Modi went to Moscow in July 2024 for the 22nd summit — the trip coinciding with a strike on a Kyiv children’s hospital, which drew unusually direct criticism from Kyiv and Washington — and then to Kyiv in August 2024, the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Ukraine. Access to both capitals is the asset India claims from the position.
• India has offered facilitation rather than mediation, declining to propose terms. As of late 2026 there is no ceasefire and no binding settlement, and Russia holds roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory.
• The costs of the position are real.
  • It strains partnerships with the states whose technology India needs, and it supplied the political predicate for the American tariff of 2025.
  • It invites the charge of inconsistency, since India insists on territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders where its own frontiers are concerned.
  • It rests on a relationship trending toward Beijing, so the interest being protected may be depreciating.
• The defence is that the alternative was worse. A state that operates a Russian-built military, imports nearly all its oil, faces a hostile China on a live frontier and wants to prevent Russia’s absorption into China’s orbit has interests that dictate abstention. India’s choice was legible in New Delhi long before it was legible in Brussels.

The American Variable

• The newest pressure comes from a third party — the first time Washington has attacked the Indo-Russian link through trade rather than arms control.
• The sequence is short and sharp. A 25% reciprocal tariff on Indian goods became 50% on 27 August 2025 when a penalty tied expressly to Russian crude was stacked on it; Rosneft and Lukoil were designated in October 2025; an interim trade understanding in February 2026 removed the oil-linked half.
• The disputed pledge must be reported as disputed. The White House stated that India had agreed to stop purchasing Russian oil. The commitment does not appear in the joint statement, India has neither confirmed nor denied it, and on 7 March 2026 the Press Information Bureau stated that “India has never depended on permission from any country to buy Russian oil”, noting that imports continued and that Russia remained India’s largest supplier. The trade agreement itself is treated with the subject of India–US relations.
• Congressional pressure has continued past the settlement. The Sanctioning Russia Act passed the United States Senate in August 2026, authorising tariffs of up to 100% on the largest purchasers of Russian energy, with a presidential waiver; it awaits House action. The instrument has changed; the pressure has not.
• Moscow’s response has been to make itself harder to leave — deeper discounts, the December 2025 summit, the 2030 programme, refinery investment, labour mobility, and offers of the Su-57. Russia now competes for India’s market rather than granting India access to it.
• India’s answer has been to refuse the framing. It has declined to accept that buying energy from one partner is a concession owed to another, absorbed the tariff for six months rather than concede the principle, and settled on commercial terms while conceding nothing publicly on Russian crude.

Multipolarity and the Multilateral Track

• Multipolarity is the one objective the two genuinely share, and they now mean different things by it. For India it means a world of several independent poles including itself; for Russia, increasingly, a world organised against the West.
• RIC — the Russia–India–China trilateral — descends directly from Primakov’s 1998 proposal. It met at foreign-minister level for two decades and has been dormant since 2020 because of the Line of Actual Control crisis.
  • Russia pressed openly through 2025 and 2026 to revive it and India stayed non-committal. The reason is structural: RIC’s only content is what the three can agree on against the United States, which is not an agenda India wants.
• BRICS is the format India actually uses: a seat in a non-Western institution it helped build, the New Development Bank, and a platform on financial architecture — while India resists proposals to make it an anti-dollar or anti-Western bloc. India chairs BRICS and hosts the September 2026 summit in New Delhi.
• The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation admitted India and Pakistan together — approved at the Ufa summit of July 2015, completed in 2017 — with Russian sponsorship balancing Chinese sponsorship of Pakistan. Its value to India is Central Asian access and counter-terrorism content; its limit is India’s refusal to endorse the Belt and Road language its statements carry.
• Russia’s support in institutions is the quiet asset. It backs India’s permanent membership of a reformed Security Council and its entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and it has supported Indian membership claims elsewhere. None of this has produced an outcome, because the obstacle in both cases is China — which is exactly the limit of Russian usefulness to India.

The Scholarly Debate

• The optimistic reading holds that the fundamentals survive. Nandan Unnikrishnan argues that a plausible geopolitical logic remains on both sides — Russia values a partner that is neither China nor the West, India values a supplier and a Eurasian interlocutor — and that Moscow is not becoming Beijing’s vassal while it holds a nuclear arsenal, a veto and its resources.
• S. Jaishankar makes the continuity argument in its strongest form, and it is a warning as much as a claim.

“Precisely because it has held so steady, this relationship is sometimes taken for granted. The case for its constant nurturing is therefore as powerful, if not more, than with the more volatile ones.”

— S. Jaishankar

• The pessimistic reading holds that decline is structural. Chietigj Bajpaee describes the present trajectory as managed decline — India preserving the forms while diversifying steadily away. Aleksei Zakharov characterises the relationship as steady but stagnating, arguing that new agreements are largely technical and that the substantive agenda has narrowed to energy and legacy defence. Rajan Menon has long argued that the Cold War partnership rested on conditions that no longer exist and that nostalgia obscures how little remains.
• Three Indian analysts define the middle position.
  • C. Raja Mohan urges clear-eyed realism: India campaigned for a multipolar world and must now learn to live in one, treating Russia as a middle power with which transactional business is possible. In the real world of politics, transactional is better than sentimental.
  • Shyam Saran identifies the operational weakness — Soviet-era nostalgia cannot drive a modern relationship, and one conducted almost entirely government-to-government, without economic depth or people-to-people ties, cannot move on a single track.
  • Harsh V. Pant frames the current dilemma as a test of definitions: strategic autonomy means retaining the capacity to make independent choices, not neutrality, and India needs Russian energy and the American partnership simultaneously.
• Srinath Raghavan’s corrective underlies all of this — the relationship was always interest-driven on the Russian side, so its cooling is a change in interests, not a betrayal.

Assessment

• The proposition that arms, trade and congruent geopolitics are no longer the relationship’s three pillars is half right, and the half that is wrong matters.
  • Arms: the flow of new platforms has fallen sharply, but the installed base and the spares dependence remain decisive for at least another decade.
  • Trade: it has grown sixfold and become more one-sided, not less — a commodity flow rather than an economic partnership.
  • Congruent geopolitics: this is the pillar that has actually broken. India and Russia now sit on opposite sides of the two questions that organise Asian security — the Indo-Pacific and the alignment with China.
• What replaced them is narrower and still real: energy at scale, legacy sustainment, the Arctic and Eurasian connectivity, labour and civil nuclear, and a Security Council vote that has never gone against India.
• The relationship is best described as an insurance policy rather than a partnership. It insures India against total dependence on the West, against a Russia wholly absorbed by China, and against an energy market with no discounted supplier. Insurance is worth paying for; it is not the same as a strategic alignment, and Indian policy has quietly stopped pretending otherwise.
• The test ahead is whether the relationship can generate anything new. Everything strong in it was built before 2022 or is a consequence of the war; the 2025 agenda of labour, Arctic shipping, nuclear localisation and rebalanced trade is the first attempt in years to add something that is neither.