India and Pakistan exchanged heavy fire overnight, marking their worst confrontation since 2019 and raising fears of an all-out war between the two nuclear-armed countries.<\/p>\n
India fired missiles at Pakistan early Wednesday, calling it retaliation for last month\u2019s attack in which gunmen killed<\/a> 26 people, mostly tourists, in India-controlled Kashmir. Pakistan said the strikes amounted to an act of war and launched a retaliatory attack.<\/p>\n The Russian Foreign Ministry said<\/a> Wednesday that it was \u201cdeeply concerned\u201d about the situation and urged both countries to \u201cshow restraint.\u00a0<\/p>\n Russia has also offered<\/a> to mediate the crisis, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov having held calls with both sides last week.<\/p>\n Amid the tensions, The Moscow Times examines Russia\u2019s relationship with both countries:<\/p>\n Russia-India relationship<\/strong><\/p>\n In December 2023, India\u2019s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar called<\/a> the India-Russia relationship the \u201cone constant in world politics,\u201d emphasizing the two countries\u2019 ties to each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n Russian support for India goes as far back as the 1950s, when the Soviet Union used<\/a> its UN Security Council veto in support of India on the issue of Kashmir.\u00a0<\/p>\n Since then, the U.S.S.R. and later Russia have played a mediating role between India and Pakistan, and the U.S.S.R. supported India throughout the Cold War.<\/p>\n However, while British foreign affairs think tank Chatham House says the relationship between the two countries is currently undergoing a \u201cmanaged decline,\u201d Moscow and New Delhi remain important partners in several areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trade between the two countries rose to<\/a> $66 billion in 2024, with an eye on reaching $100 billion by 2030.<\/p>\n Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has visited<\/a> Russia twice in the past year, and he has met with Vladimir Putin 17 times in the last decade.<\/p>\n Russian oil, which accounted for just 2% of India\u2019s total imports before Moscow\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, has ballooned to over 40% as of June 2024. In December, the two countries penned<\/a> a 10-year, $13 billion deal to supply 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day to Indian private refiner Reliance.\u00a0<\/p>\n The two countries also cooperate on nuclear energy. Russia\u2019s state nuclear power provider Rosatom has an agreement<\/a> in place to build six nuclear power reactors in India.<\/p>\n Russia and India are also deeply involved when it comes to defense. Chatham House notes that Russia accounts for over 50% of India\u2019s military equipment and that India is the largest importer of Russian arms worldwide.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, India has attempted to walk a diplomatic tightrope when it comes to Russia\u2019s war on Ukraine, neither condemning nor voicing support for the invasion.\u00a0 It has also abstained numerous times on UN resolutions condemning Moscow\u2019s actions, and the country is the second-largest supplier of restricted critical technologies to Russia.<\/p>\n Russia-Pakistan relationship<\/strong><\/p>\n The Russia-Pakistan relationship has deepened in recent years after Pakistan\u2019s pro-Western orientation during the Cold War.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bilateral trade reached<\/a> $1 billion in 2023, the highest-ever level between the two countries, and\u00a0Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk said in 2024 that Russia would support<\/a> Pakistan\u2019s inclusion in the BRICS economic bloc.<\/p>\n \u201cPakistan-Russia relations since [2011] have been moving on an upward trajectory, however slowly,\u201d Muhammad Murad, a Ph.D. political science candidate at the University of Bonn, wrote<\/a> in The Diplomat.<\/p>\n In 2017, Islamabad joined<\/a> the Moscow- and Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization in an effort to deepen its regional cooperation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Four years later, Russia and Pakistan signed<\/a> an agreement to construct a gas pipeline from Karachi to Lahore.<\/p>\n \u201cDespite the growing ties between Islamabad and Moscow, there is still a certain level of existing mistrust between the two countries owing to Pakistan\u2019s neutral stance on the Russia-Ukraine war and its alleged supply of weapons to Ukraine,\u201d says Murad.<\/p>\n Pakistan allegedly sold<\/a> $364 million in arms to Ukraine and Israel to cover<\/a> the funding gap required to finance an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan. The county\u2019s government has denied<\/a> that the sale took place.<\/p>\n While Pakistan has abstained three times from voting for UN resolutions that would condemn Russia\u2019s conduct in Ukraine, it has called for Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty to be respected.<\/p>\n Prashant Singh, a Delhi-based researcher, views Russia-Pakistan relations from another angle.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere is one constant: Pakistan-Russia relations have always acted as a subset of the regional geopolitical pentagon composed of Russia, the United States, China, India and Pakistan,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in The Diplomat.<\/p>\n He noted that cooperation between the two countries is traditionally limited to energy, food security and counterterrorism, because arms sales would anger India.\u00a0<\/p>\n