What was Putin’s visit to India really about?
The trip to India, after a four-year gap, was not driven by a single motive
By Jayanta Roy Chowdhury
New Delhi (UNI). As Russian President Vladimir Putin flew out of Delhi for the colder climes of Moscow, a stock-taking of what really happened behind the glamour and glitz of the high-profile visit reveals that there was as much substance as there were hopes pinned on this one visit in the midst of a European war and efforts to strike a peace bargain.
The trip to India, after a four-year gap, was not driven by a single motive. It was, instead, a calibrated mix of geopolitical signaling, strategic hedging, and hard economic bargaining, all wrapped in the optics of a long-standing personal equation with New Delhi.
Putin knew well that the optics of his trip to India would ripple across Western capitals. A sanctioned, diplomatically isolated leader being warmly received by a Quad member and a US strategic partner sends a message, but it is far more subtle than simple defiance.
As the Kremlin negotiates a peace deal in Ukraine, it also needed to show that Russia is not diplomatically quarantined, and that major non-Western powers still see value in engaging with it. This, in turn, reinforces Russia’s narrative of a multipolar world.
For India, which has refused to criticise Russia for the war in Ukraine while offering to “contribute” to the peace effort, there is a significant subtext emerging from the visit: New Delhi is positioning itself as the central swing power that refuses to be folded into any particular camp. However, all the subtle signalling emanating from the Kremlin and Raisina Hill was secondary, a by-product, not the primary objective.
For Putin, the trip was also about re-anchoring Russia in India’s defence market. India remains Russia’s largest defence customer, but its market share has been eroding for a decade.
The trip, with its offers to sell more S-400 missiles, which proved successful in India’s last skirmish with Pakistan, and Su-35 fighter jets to replace the Indian Air Force’s ageing fleet, as well as the unprecedented offer for joint production and technology transfer for Russia’s Su-57 stealth fighter, could lure India to remain a major anchor for the Russian military-industrial complex.
That India, in turn, has become more demanding, insisting on better financing terms, more localisation, complete technology transfer, guaranteed timelines, and protection in case of sanctions, seems to have been factored in by both sides.
The visit was also underpinned by economics and geography. Russia needs a new growth engine, and India definitely fits into that. India needs alternative markets and realises its ‘Look West’ trade policy lacks insurance in an era of trade wars and sharp economic slowdowns. Russia’s economy, despite its USD 2.6 trillion size and deep resilience, is under pressure, not only because of Western sanctions, which have shrunk its export market and limited finance for investments and trade deals. Russia, with its vast landmass, faces a paradoxical labor shortage and needs short-term worker imports, looking to India, with its near inexhaustible supply of labor, to fill that gap.
Hence the need for both sides to push bilateral trade to USD 100 billion within the next five years and to underpin that trade with an exchange of national currencies. The huge rupee-rouble fund that Moscow has accumulated from Indian purchases of its mineral wealth, crude oil, gold, and diamonds is expected to allow Russia to buy from and invest in India almost without limits.
To help trade flourish, the two sides have for some-time been also trying to develop new international trade routes including the North-South corridor from Russia via Central Asia and Iran to India.
Perhaps one of the most strategically important layer of the visit was Russia’s desire to rebalance an increasingly asymmetric dependence on China.
Since 2022, Russia’s isolation has pushed it deep into Beijing’s embrace, politically, militarily, technologically and even psychologically. Kremlin’s leadership knows this is unsustainable if Russia wishes to keep its place as one the world’s pre-eminent nations.
What India offers Russia is a non-Chinese Asian partner with global legitimacy which also happens to be a major market for defence, energy and nuclear deals. The trip in short, unveils a relationship that gives Moscow room to manoeuvre between Beijing and the wider non-Western world.
India on the other hand, ever-obsessed with memories of the China-US détente brokered by Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, which saw the USA abandoning the Tibetan cause and the two powers ranging against India in 1971 over Bangladesh, sees the deepening of its relationship with Russia as the hedge it was always used to.
The two sides by signing a military logistics deal which allows both nations to use each other’s bases and ports, gain significantly. Russia gets a foothold in the vital Indian Ocean, through which half of the world’s commerce travels, while India gets a “Russian cover” in its backyard, which is increasingly being threatened by heightened incursions from other global naval powers, besides a foothold in the new great game over Arctic routes and mining rights.
However, it also throws up questions over an extremely delicate factor underpinning the Modi–Putin summit: the relationship each has with Washington. Putin’s recent meetings with US envoys over Ukraine show that Moscow sets high value on direct negotiation with the United States. At the same time, India remains a critical pillar of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy and a key player in the Quad alliance whose unstated objective is to contain China.
This creates a fluid and unpredictable dynamic situation where if Washington-Moscow talks make progress, India could emerge as a diplomatic intermediary and enjoy what could be a “sweet-spot” period, when it stands in the middle of it all, and possibly in times ahead forge a US-Russia-India triangular relationship.
On the other hand, if negotiations stall or fail, the US may intensify pressure on India to reduce its Russian ties, particularly on oil and defense cooperation. This peculiar dynamic is the geopolitical undercurrent shaping India’s future choices. Delhi must navigate between its partnership with Washington and its long-standing ties with Moscow while protecting its autonomy.
This brings us to another question, why was the visit timed as it was, in the midst of war and sensitive peace negotiations? One factor, which a diplomat spoke of in a private conversation, may have hit the nail: If Putin had waited longer, India could have drift further towards the West, weakening Russia’s leverage in the world.
