The Old Friendship in a New World: India and Russia After Ukraine

The relationship between India and Russia carries an emotional weight in Indian strategic culture that is difficult to fully convey to outside observers, rooted in the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation that provided crucial diplomatic cover, including a Soviet veto threat at the United Nations Security Council, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, and reinforced across decades by Soviet and then Russian willingness to supply advanced defence technology, including licensed production arrangements for the Sukhoi Su-30MKI fighter and, more recently, the S-400 air defence system, at times and on terms that Western suppliers were unwilling or legally unable to match given non-proliferation and human rights conditionalities attached to American and European arms exports. Even today, a substantial share of India's military hardware across the army, navy and air force traces its lineage to Soviet or Russian design, creating a dependency on spare parts, maintenance expertise and upgrade pathways that cannot be unwound quickly regardless of how the strategic winds shift.

This history explains, though it does not by itself justify to every observer, India's studied neutrality since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, expressed through repeated abstentions on United Nations General Assembly and Security Council resolutions condemning the invasion, continued and indeed sharply expanded purchases of discounted Russian crude oil that helped Indian refiners profit from arbitrage while also, critics note, indirectly cushioning Russia's war-financing capacity, and a diplomatic posture that has called for dialogue and a return to peace without assigning explicit blame, a formulation that has irritated Western partners while reflecting India's broader discomfort with binary alignment in a conflict it views as geographically and historically distant from its core interests, even as its own decades of experience with territorial aggression by a larger neighbour might have suggested a different sympathy.

The case India makes for itself

India's defenders of this position, and it is a position with genuine coherence rather than mere convenient hedging, point to several factors. First, the practical reality of defence dependence: an abrupt diplomatic rupture with Russia would jeopardise the maintenance and upgrade pipeline for a large share of India's existing military inventory at a moment when India faces live territorial tension with China along the Line of Actual Control and cannot afford degraded readiness. Second, the discounted oil purchases have delivered real macroeconomic benefit to an energy-import-dependent economy, helping contain inflationary pressure during a period of global energy price volatility following the invasion, a benefit Indian officials argue accrues to ordinary consumers and industry rather than constituting complicity in the war itself. Third, India has consistently argued, with some historical justification, that Western nations themselves continued substantial trade with adversarial or sanctioned regimes when convenient to their own interests, making the demand that India alone bear a disproportionate diplomatic and economic cost for neutrality appear selectively applied.

What has genuinely changed

Yet it would be intellectually dishonest to treat the relationship as static simply because Delhi's posture toward it has remained consistent. Russia's own strategic position has been transformed by the war in ways that materially affect the value India derives from the relationship. Western sanctions have pushed Russia into deepening economic and technological dependence on China to a degree without precedent in the post-Soviet period, with bilateral trade between Russia and China reaching record levels and Russian energy exports reoriented substantially eastward, a dependence that inevitably gives Beijing greater leverage over Moscow's foreign policy choices, including, at least in principle, choices affecting the India-Russia defence relationship that India has relied upon for decades.

This raises an uncomfortable question India's strategic establishment has been slower than it should be to confront publicly: can Russia be relied upon as an independent defence partner and diplomatic counterweight if its own economic and technological survival increasingly depends on the goodwill of the same China that India considers its primary long-term strategic rival. Russian arms deliveries to India have already faced documented delays attributed partly to the war's own demand on Russian production capacity and partly to sanctions-driven component shortages, including reported delays affecting S-400 deliveries and spare parts for existing platforms, offering an early empirical signal that a war-strained, increasingly China-dependent Russia may simply be a less reliable supplier than the Soviet Union or pre-2022 Russia was, regardless of the diplomatic warmth both governments continue to express.

Diversification already underway, unevenly

India's own defence procurement trends since 2014 show a genuine, if incomplete, diversification away from near-total Russian dependence, with France, the United States and Israel becoming substantially larger suppliers of major platforms including the Rafale fighter jet, artillery systems and missile defence and surveillance technology, alongside an increasingly serious, though still uneven, indigenous defence manufacturing push under initiatives such as Make in India and the Defence Acquisition Procedure's emphasis on domestic content requirements. This diversification predates the Ukraine war and reflects longer-standing Indian strategic thinking about reducing single-supplier vulnerability rather than a direct response to Russia's weakened position, but the war has plausibly accelerated the underlying logic by demonstrating concretely how a major supplier's own war-fighting needs and sanctions exposure can disrupt delivery timelines India depends upon.

The energy relationship's own fragility

Even the oil trade, the most visible and economically significant dimension of the post-2022 relationship, carries structural fragility that receives less attention than it deserves. The arrangement depends on price discounts that reflect Russia's constrained market access rather than any durable structural advantage, on a shadow fleet of tankers and insurance arrangements that Western sanctions regimes continue to probe and periodically disrupt, and on payment mechanisms, including rupee-rouble settlement experiments that have struggled with currency convertibility and Russia's limited appetite for accumulating non-convertible rupee balances, that remain considerably less smooth than dollar-denominated trade. None of this makes the oil relationship worthless to India, but it does mean the economic benefit is more contingent and more exposed to geopolitical shock than the confident tone of Indian official commentary sometimes suggests.

A friendship worth preserving, honestly reassessed

None of this argues for India abandoning the relationship, which continues to serve genuine and defensible Indian interests, nor does it suggest India should align uncritically with a Western position that has, at times, applied standards to India's neutrality that it has not consistently applied to its own historical dealings with authoritarian regimes. But India's strategic community would serve the country better by retiring the assumption, inherited from an earlier and genuinely different geopolitical era, that Russia remains a fully independent great power capable of serving as a reliable counterweight in India's broader hedge against Chinese dominance in Asia. The Russia India can rely upon today is a materially weaker, more sanctioned and more China-dependent partner than the one that vetoed hostile resolutions in 1971, and honest Indian foreign policy planning, including continued defence diversification and clear-eyed limits on how much of India's future security architecture should depend on a single relationship, needs to proceed from that changed reality rather than from institutional and emotional habit alone.