In July 2024, on the same day a Russian missile smashed into Kyiv’s most prominent children’s hospital, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at his suburban residence near Moscow. During the visit, the two leaders discussed ways to strengthen trade and energy ties between their countries. Weeks later, the Indian prime minister met with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Kyiv, pledging to provide humanitarian assistance to the war-torn country and highlighting that India’s position was one not of neutrality, but peace.
Modi’s diplomatic tightrope reflects India’s careful positioning between the two competing blocs. On the one hand, New Delhi is clearly uncomfortable with Moscow’s blatant disregard of basic international principles. On the other hand, India’s attitude toward Russia continues to be influenced by historical affinity between the two countries and India’s pursuit of strategic autonomy in its foreign policy, an approach that seeks to elide alliances with any one power bloc. Despite Modi’s assertions, on the international stage New Delhi has largely maintained a neutral-to-pro-Russian tilt in regard to Russia’s war in Ukraine, usually abstaining from UN General Assembly resolutions condemning Moscow’s actions. Bilaterally, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has described Russo-Indian ties as the “one constant in world politics,” and many in New Delhi retain a degree of sympathy for Moscow’s narrative of the war, which links it to NATO expansion into Russia’s self-perceived sphere of influence. Following the invasion, India has also become one of the largest purchasers of Russian oil.
Yet there is a growing belief among the Western expert community that Russo-Indian ties are undergoing “a managed decline” shaped by Moscow’s deteriorating international and regional standing and its strengthened relations with Beijing—New Delhi’s rival in the Asia-Pacific. At the same time, India has increased its cooperation with the United States, including in its historically Russia-dominated defense-security space.
This paper delves into the not-so-linear trajectory of the Russia-India relationship, starting with an overview of Cold War–era ties that left a lingering influence on India’s present-day outlook toward Russia. Following this, the paper discusses New Delhi’s entrenched military security reliance on Moscow and the two countries’ reinvigorated energy trade after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The paper’s final section outlines key concerns underpinning Russo-Indian relations and discusses how they could be leveraged to advance U.S. foreign policy interests vis-à-vis India.
Tracing the Roots of Russo-Indian Relations
Moscow’s diplomatic relations with New Delhi started in 1947, shortly before India gained independence. However, there were prior connections between anti-colonial revolutionaries in India and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Indian National Congress leaders in the 1930s and 1940s—including the country’s future first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru—also admired Soviet planning’s apparent success in rapid industrialization, and sought to impose it in India. Such connections established affinities between newly independent India and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.
In the context of the Cold War, Soviet Russia’s approach to India was shaped by the desire to spread communism and confront the United States in different theaters around the world, as well as by the developments in Sino-Soviet ties. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, viewed India as a “natural ally” for its distrust of the West and the capitalist model, as well as its openness to using socialist principles to shape certain economic policies. For instance, on a quest to achieve economic self-sufficiency, India welcomed Soviet investment in its mining, energy, and steel industries, and based its economic planning model on the Soviet Union’s five-year plan. The Khrushchev era also saw the Sino-Soviet ideological-strategic split, with Moscow’s growing ties to New Delhi exacerbating the fallout. For instance, during the 1962 Sino-Indian war, the Soviet Union maintained a policy of neutrality, angering China.
The Indo-Soviet partnership enjoyed its heyday under Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor. At first, Moscow assumed a mediator’s role in the 1965 India-Pakistan war. In 1971, however, when India and Pakistan again went to war, the Soviet Union firmly supported India, while the United States and China sided with Pakistan. Earlier that year, Soviet leadership had signed the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with India, which stipulated that in the instance of an attack against either party, the two signatories would “take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries.” The war ended with New Delhi’s decisive victory and the subsequent secession of East Pakistan, which became the independent state of Bangladesh. The treaty is believed to have played an important role in limiting U.S. and Chinese pressure on India to stop its military operation in East Pakistan during the war.
The late Brezhnev era also saw India emerge as one of the chief purchasers of Soviet weapons, with Moscow offering New Delhi more attractive payment options than those of Western states in exchange for political leverage (please see the next section for more). Thus, despite India’s efforts at retaining autonomy by denying the Soviet Union naval bases in the 1970s, its dependence on Soviet weapons became a pressure point. For instance, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko traveled to India with a $1.6 billion Soviet arms deal offer featuring an extended repayment period of 15 years instead of the usual 10. The offer induced New Delhi’s acquiescence to a widely unpopular war.
However, India’s muted support for the invasion of Afghanistan in return for a favorable arms deal also signaled a gradual transformation of the Indo-Soviet relationship into “a trade-off of favours,” increasingly devoid of ideological convergence. Furthermore, under the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose primary goals were to reduce Cold War–era tensions with the United States and to normalize relations with China, strengthening ties with India was no longer considered a Soviet foreign policy priority. Consequently, in the final years of the Soviet Union, Indo-Soviet ties started to fizzle out, with New Delhi realizing that its regional concerns were ultimately peripheral to Moscow’s strategic calculus.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, India established diplomatic ties with Russia in 1993 by signing the India-Russia Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation (replacing the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation) and the Military-Technical Cooperation Agreement, the latter ensuring continuation of arms trade, joint ventures, and technology transfer between the two. New Delhi and Moscow have signed even more strategic partnership agreements since Putin assumed the presidency in 2000; Modi and Putin have met 17 times throughout the past decade, accompanied since 2021 by the so-called 2+2 dialogues between their respective foreign and defense ministers. On a societal level, Soviet support to India in the 1960s and 1970s has translated into a high degree of affinity toward Russia both among Indian policy elites and the wider Indian public. For instance, in 2023, around 57 percent of Indians viewed Russia favorably, with this number decreasing yet still remaining significant in 2024 and 2025 (46 percent and 49 percent, respectively).
However, many experts believe that the contemporary Indo-Russian relationship cannot be compared with the Indo-Soviet partnership of the 1960s and 1970s. While bilateral trade has increased nearly six times following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—from a mere $10 billion pre-2022 to $69 billion in fiscal year 2024–2025—this change has been mostly attributed to India’s purchase of discounted Russian crude oil. By contrast, New Delhi’s trade with Washington—its largest trading partner for the fourth consecutive year—reached $132 billion in FY 2024–2025, followed by Beijing—New Delhi’s regional rival and long-term security concern—at $128 billion. Yet areas of dependency persist, including in the defense and energy domains (as discussed below), rendering India’s position toward Russia more constrained and ambivalent—for the foreseeable future, at least.
From Dependency to Diversification: Russia-India Defense Ties
India is the world’s largest importer of arms and Russia’s largest export market for arms. India’s arms imports policy is undergirded by three requirements: quality, cost, and timeframes. A fourth critical factor for New Delhi is indigenous production, which also affects availability, as some foreign suppliers are unable or unwilling to offer India the opportunity to license-produce weapons. The history of India’s defense imports relationship with the Soviet Union, and Russia thereafter, has thus centered on these criteria being met. The following sections provide an overview of this relationship, starting with India’s turn toward the Soviet Union in the 1950s due to the unavailability of Western platforms and tracing its subsequent efforts, from the 1980s onward, to diversify away from Soviet/Russian weapons by procuring more NATO systems and focusing on defense indigenization.
1950s–1970s: Establishing Russo-Indian Arms Relations
India’s first purchase of Soviet weapons occurred in the late 1950s. The country procured Soviet An-12 transport aircraft, Mi-4 helicopters, and M-160 mm mortars, which were useful for operations at high Himalayan altitudes where India had already warred with Pakistan in 1948 and faced a deteriorating security situation with China by the late 1950s. By the 1960s, these defense relations deepened in response to India’s growing security concerns, including a lost war to China in 1962 and another stalemate with Pakistan in 1965. India was also denied certain defense equipment by the United States and by its traditional supplier, the United Kingdom.
Throughout this period, two programs exemplified India’s growing attachment to Soviet weapons and its divorce from NATO suppliers that would last for decades: its acquisition of (1) Soviet supersonic fighter jets and (2) submarines. After rival Pakistan began operating the supersonic F-104 Starfighter sent by the United States in 1961, India started desperately seeking a supersonic fighter jet, making inquiries about the Soviet second-generation supersonic MiG-21. Perturbed by India’s potential procurement of a major Soviet platform, the United Kingdom offered an export variant of the English Electric Lightning supersonic fighter jet, but the talks failed over India’s demands to license-produce this system. By contrast, the Soviet Union’s offer of the MiG-21 met India’s criteria on affordability and indigenous manufacturing—the Soviets provided New Delhi with a loan and agreed to licensed production. Consequently, the Indian Air Force began operating the MiG-21 in 1964. The relationship was further concertized by a Soviet offer of Su-7 and Su-7B fighter-bombers in 1967 at a more affordable price than those of the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, and India subsequently operated those systems as well. A similar situation arose in terms of submarines, as Pakistan acquired a used Tench-class submarine from the United States in 1964. After New Delhi’s futile attempt to purchase submarines from the United Kingdom, it again turned to the Soviet Union, procuring variants of the Soviet Foxtrot-class diesel-electric submarines in the 1960s and 1970s.
By the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan, the Indian Army was also operating a wide array of other Soviet weapons, including T-54/55 tanks, lightly armored PT-76 amphibious tanks (which proved useful in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971), the BTR-50PK Armored Personnel Carriers, and different variants of towed guns (such as the 130mm M46, the 100mm BS-3, the 122mm D-30, and the 152mm D-20 variants).
1980s: First Efforts Toward Diversifying and Indigenizing India’s Defense Sector