India’s Modi seeks to shore up ties with Russia and offset China’s sway

Modi will arrive in Moscow on Monday, marking his first visit to the country in five years. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, Modi’s presence will be an opportunity to show that Russia still has influential friends after more than two years of Western efforts to isolate the country.

Modi will get to Moscow just as Washington prepares to host a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting that will focus on supporting Ukraine as the war drags on. 

The trip will be Modi’s first bilateral visit of his third term. Days after taking office in June, Modi met with President Biden as well as Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the Group of Seven summit in Italy.

“There have been some misgivings that there is a dilution in India-Russia ties due to Western pressure," said Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary and former ambassador to Russia. “The visit will quell this speculation."

Modi and Putin last met in 2022 at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional security bloc founded by Russia and China. They are overdue to get together again based on an agreement the two countries have that calls for a summit between their leaders annually.

Scheduling the summit was a priority because it hadn’t taken place since 2021, Indian Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra said Friday. The meeting is the “highest mechanism to steer and drive cooperation between our two countries," he said.

Russia and India have enjoyed close ties dating from the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union became India’s main military supplier. But in recent years, shared concerns over China’s rise have prompted the U.S. and India to draw closer.

Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese relations have flourished as the authoritarian powers band together to confront what they see as a Western campaign to hem them both in. Putin visited Beijing in May and met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan on Wednesday, ahead of this year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting. Modi didn’t attend this year.

India is trying to offer a counterweight to U.S. and European sanctions that it believes have pushed Moscow closer to Beijing, political experts say. India wants to “ensure Russia has alternatives, that Russia isn’t cornered and doesn’t have to put all its eggs into the Chinese basket," said Aleksei Zakharov, a Moscow-based expert on Russia-India relations.

In India’s calculus, Russia is part of its efforts to counter its more powerful neighbor. Relations between India and China have deteriorated sharply in recent years, particularly in the wake of a 2020 clash on their disputed Himalayan border that left 20 Indian soldiers dead and killed four Chinese troops.

“It will be impossible to contain China in Asia if Russia becomes a junior partner of China," said Nandan Unnikrishnan, head of the Eurasia program at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank.

Like many leaders, Modi skipped a peace summit organized by Kyiv in Switzerland last month, but has expressed concern over the war. In 2022, at his first meeting with Putin after Russia invaded Ukraine, Modi publicly voiced concern over the war’s impact on global stability.

Also on the agenda will be sorting out areas of friction in the relationship that have arisen since the war, including Russia’s recruitment of Indian nationals as part of an effort to enlist foreign fighters in its war effort.

More than two dozen nationals have reached out for help after they said they were deceived into enlisting, according to Indian officials, and India has been able to bring back 10 people. Another four have died in fighting.

In recent months, India has raised the issue of securing the early release of its nationals more publicly and more forcefully.

“It upsets us why Russian authorities haven’t heeded to our demand promptly," said an Indian official.

Suresh Kumar, a grocery-shop owner in northern India whose 19-year-old son Harsh Kumar traveled to Russia around Christmas and soon ended up on the front lines, said his son hadn’t yet returned. But he said he was hopeful India’s interventions would soon be successful after his son said the Indian Embassy in Moscow had told him and his friends in a recent call that the process for their return was “90% complete."

In June, India’s Foreign Ministry demanded that the Russian army stop recruiting Indian nationals, indicating the issue could damage relations between the countries.

S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, said in a post on X that he had pressed for the return of Indian nationals fighting for Russia in a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Kazakhstan this week.

Trade between the two countries has become severely lopsided, with India’s massive purchases of discounted Russian oil driving imports from the country up to more than $60 billion. That has left Moscow with a big surplus of rupees it can hardly use, with purchases from India at just over $4 billion.

The two countries could also progress on a logistics agreement several years in the making that would simplify the refueling and resupplying of deployed vessels at each other’s ports. India has similar agreements with other countries, including the U.S. and the U.K.

While officials on both sides are set to telegraph that the relationship is as robust as ever, political experts say a fundamental shift is taking place, with strategic components giving way to more transactional elements. In part, the transformation comes as India’s economic and diplomatic stature has grown, while Russia’s has diminished.

“The future of Russia as this industrial powerhouse that it once was by comparison with India, is very much in doubt now that Russia is cut off from most Western technology and relies on China for substitutes or secondhand Western tech and equipment, and it is struggling to produce enough weapons for its own military," said Eugene Rumer, a senior fellow and the director of the Carnegie think tank’s Russia and Eurasia program. “So how can it be a reliable supplier to the Indian military?"

An Indian security official said Indian forces have already started discarding and minimizing the use of decades-old Russian tanks, artillery, ships and helicopters, and don’t intend to place any major future orders for fighter aircraft or advanced military equipment to Moscow.

Still, large parts of India’s army and air force remain reliant on Russian heavy equipment, such as jet fighters and armored tanks, and therefore still need a steady supply of spare parts, an issue that will also be part of discussions next week.

Russia has been moving to produce some equipment in India in collaboration with domestic firms. On Thursday, Russia’s Rosoboronexport, a unit of state-run defense giant Rostec, said it had reached an agreement to locally produce armor-piercing rounds used by India’s Russian-made tanks. Last year, the two countries also established joint production of Kalashnikov rifles in India.

“India-Russia cooperation on spares, their co-production in India, isn’t a new item of discussion between the two countries," Kwatra, the foreign secretary, said Friday. “This is part of a longstanding understanding between the two countries on how different systems and subsystems could eventually end up getting manufactured in India."

Indian analysts say Russia’s intractable war in Ukraine has dimmed its appeal as a key strategic partner and there are concerns that Moscow’s increasing reliance on China might make it an unreliable ally for New Delhi in any future conflicts with Beijing.

“Will Russia balk from backing us up like they used to in the past?" said Sreeram Chaulia, dean at O.P. Jindal Global University’s School of International Affairs in Sonipat, India. “These question marks are around."

Shan Li and Krishna Pokharel contributed to this article.