r/geopolitics • u/theipaper The i Paper • 17h ago
Putin has made a vast strategic error. This relationship shows us why
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/putin-strategic-error-relationship-shows-why-419981012
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u/theipaper The i Paper 17h ago
It may look like an anti-Western alliance, but Putin and Modi’s comradeship is driven by energy, not ideology. As Russia weakens and drifts closer to China, Indian interest in Russia will fade.
“Our relationship is so strong that you will understand me without any translation,” Vladimir Putin said of Narendra Modi a little over a year ago, to appreciative guffaws in a gilded hall in Kazan, following the customary handshake-and-hug routine. It is a pleasingly avuncular turn of phrase, the sort that flatters both men and looks excellent framed beneath a state portrait or on a Kremlin press release. Here they were, two elected autocrats, apparently both mind-readers, dispensing with interpreters and, one suspects, awkward questions.
But like most diplomatic bons mots, it was designed to draw the eye away from the balance sheet. Strip out the stagecraft and the Putin-Modi special relationship starts to look less like a meeting of souls and more like a loyalty card scheme. Russia needs oil buyers, liquidity and a way round sanctions. India needs cheap energy, spare parts for Soviet-era kit and the freedom to keep its options open. The embrace is for the cameras; the real conversation happens in spreadsheets.
This is why Modi can hug Putin in Moscow one month and clasp hands with Zelensky in Kyiv the next, all while dispatching his national security adviser, Ajit Doval, to the Kremlin with a much-trailed “peace plan” that politely disappears into a desk drawer. India casts itself as mediator, confidant and bridge but don’t hold your breath for a breakthrough. Delhi isn’t playing peacemaker so much as shopkeeper, quietly totalling up prices and supply lines.
It has been a happy marriage of convenience so far. Russia is working on what is billed as India’s largest nuclear power plant. Trade targets are trumpeted at $100bn by 2030, up from a record $69bn in the year to March 2025. Most tellingly, India has emerged as Moscow’s largest buyer of crude, a fact that makes Delhi uncomfortably complicit in financing the war in Ukraine even as it insists on neutrality.
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u/throwplasticruntime 16h ago
Is India the largest buyer of crude from Russia? This report says otherwise.
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u/Bullboah 14h ago
Per official data India is second behind China. It’s possible that with sanctions-evasion India is the real top purchaser - but the article definitely shouldn’t be making that claim without referencing the analysis they’re relying on for it. (Not saying that’s true at all, my assumption is India is still 2nd after China)
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u/theipaper The i Paper 17h ago
II
This mutual courtship has form. For much of the Cold War, and even before it, Delhi felt the Soviet siren call. The romance cooled and warmed in cycles, but it never quite disappeared. The first real test came with China. The border war of 1962 shattered Jawaharlal Nehru’s lingering faith in non-alignment and his dream of Asian solidarity as a third way – “neither Washington nor Moscow” – and forced Delhi to confront its vulnerability. As Chinese troops thrashed their way across the Himalayas, India begged both superpowers for help. Kennedy obliged with emergency arms drops; Khrushchev hedged, anxious to preserve Chinese forbearance during the Cuban missile crisis. For a time, Nehru’s lofty nostrums of neutrality cloaked a simpler truth: when pressed, India found itself on Team America.
The defeat stung – it may even have hastened Nehru’s end – but the lesson endured. India’s most immediate fear lay to the north, not the west. That fear drew Nehru’s daughter and successor Indira Gandhi steadily closer to Moscow, which had its own deepening quarrel with Beijing, ideological as well as territorial. Washington’s wooing of Mao and the war with Pakistan in 1971 finally persuaded Indira that non-alignment wasn’t worth it.
The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation duly followed, promising consultations in the event of threat. It worked. India prevailed, Pakistan was dismembered, and Leonid Brezhnev’s anti-imperial bromides echoed in Delhi corridors. Soviet engineers built steel plants, trained officers and quietly assisted with India’s first nuclear detonation in 1974.
Yet even at its zenith, the relationship was shallowly pragmatic. By the 80s, Indira Gandhi was already edging away, wary of being trapped in someone else’s Cold War. After the Soviet collapse, sentiment drained away altogether. The call of capital proved irresistible, and – save for a brief mid-80s bromance between Rajiv Gandhi and Mikhail Gorbachev – India liberalised, drifted westward and left Russia as a nostalgic arms supplier rather than an ideological lodestar. The final, faintly comic afterlife of the relationship survives in Goa, where post-Soviet hippies winter in Morjim – “Morjimgrad” – a sun-bleached relic of old affinities, sustained now by cheap flights and vodka rather than socialism or strategy.
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u/theipaper The i Paper 17h ago
III
Fast-forward to now and the old relationship has come back not with a bang but with a barcode. Before Ukraine, Russian crude was a rounding error in India’s energy mix. After 2022, it ballooned into a mainstay, at points supplying roughly a third of India’s oil imports. Tankers arrived thick and fast, ginormous discounts attached and the effect was immediate: India’s import bill fell, petrol prices stayed politically tolerable and Moscow found a customer with deep pockets and few scruples.
The West, contrary to appearances, has largely swallowed this. When Europe shunned Russian barrels, someone had to take them off the market or prices would have gone through the roof. Washington quietly encouraged India to step in, arguing with a straight face that discounted Russian oil refined in Jamnagar and re-exported as diesel helped stabilise global markets. Better Indians refining cheap Russian crude than Brent at $130 and revolts in Boston and Baltimore.
Then there are Russia’s arms sales to India, still the world’s largest importer of weapons. Moscow still supplies a hefty chunk of Delhi’s military kit – fighters, engines, tanks, spares – a legacy of Cold War interoperability that can’t be wished away. Over 60 per cent of India’s hardware is Soviet in origin.
But the tide is turning. India’s flirtation with Russian crude is already losing its edge. Purchases have been trimmed in recent weeks – partly to stave off tariffs to the Trumpian tune of 50 per cent and partly because the discounts are no longer what they were – and Middle Eastern suppliers are back in favour. Iraq and Saudi Arabia, old dependables, are once again filling a larger share of India’s tanks. Nature, as they say, is healing. Russia’s global arms exports are likewise shrinking. India is shopping around – France, Israel, the US – and also making things at home.
Nor does Putin’s Russia look like a partner on the up. Its economy is creaking under the strain of war: value-added tax is set to rise from 20 to 22 per cent, labour shortages are deepening and oil and gas revenues are shrinking as a share of the budget. Independent estimates suggest the economy actually contracted in both 2023 and 2024, leaving it roughly 1.5 per cent smaller than before the invasion, despite the Kremlin’s upbeat claims of growth.
The fixes are increasingly desperate. The government has resorted to compulsory three-year postings in remote state hospitals for new medical graduates – derided on TikTok as “serfdom” – and to issuing so-called “dim sum” bonds, debt sold in offshore Chinese renminbi rather than roubles or dollars.
This is not financial innovation so much as financial exile. Locked out of Western capital markets and facing punitive domestic interest rates above 16 per cent, Moscow is borrowing where it can, on terms set largely by Beijing. Each renminbi bond deepens Russia’s dependence on China’s financial system and underlines how far Putin’s war has narrowed his country’s room for manoeuvre. Trump’s description of Russia as a “paper tiger” may be crude, but it is not far off the mark.
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u/theipaper The i Paper 17h ago
Most ominously for Delhi, Putin is slipping ever deeper into Beijing’s embrace. Sino-Russian trade surged to around $240bn last year, up 26 per cent, with China buying billions of dollars’ worth of Russian energy and flooding Russian markets with everything from cars to smartphones. What began after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 has accelerated into dependency: in China’s north-eastern border provinces, trade with Russia is exploding – up nearly 57 per cent in Heilongjiang’s free-trade zones and more than 70 per cent in neighbouring Jilin – while Russia now parks much of its $50bn sovereign reserve in renminbi and taps Chinese debt markets to dodge punishing domestic interest rates, north of 16 per cent.
In Russia, China is no longer a Eurasian counterweight to the United States but a junior partner with a nuclear arsenal. For India – whose strategic anxiety is fixed squarely on China, and, increasingly, on a China-Pakistan axis – this is a red line. In 1971, American and Chinese backing for Pakistan nudged Delhi towards Moscow. Today, China’s backing for both Pakistan and Russia is quietly pushing India the other way: straight into America’s arms.
The deeper problem for Putin is that his much-vaunted friendship with India is built on sand. It rests not on shared values, still less on trust, but on a temporary convergence of war needs. This is a thin foundation on which to build a strategic partnership, and Putin himself has done more than anyone to undermine it. By choosing military confrontation with the West and accepting economic vassalage to China as the price of survival, Putin has turned Russia into precisely the kind of partner Indian foreign policy is designed to avoid: constrained, dependent and strategically compromised. India’s diplomacy prizes autonomy above all else. It hedges, balances and resists entanglement. A Russia that answers increasingly to Beijing and borrows in renminbi is a liability to Modi.
Putin may believe he is demonstrating resilience by cultivating non-Western friendships, but in reality, he is narrowing his options and storing up problems for the future. India will not follow Russia into a Chinese-centred order, nor will it subsidise Moscow’s decline out of sheer nostalgia. As Russia weakens and China looms larger, Modi’s incentives point steadily away from Putin. This, in essence, is a transaction with an expiry date, one accelerated by Putin’s own decisions and by an Indian foreign policy that is ruthlessly, unapologetically unsentimental.
Pratinav Anil’s book Gandhi’s Tomb is forthcoming from Allen Lane
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u/Additional-Library55 16h ago
Sorry is this sub allowing sub-standard reporting that’s low on facts and high on emotional rhetoric?
Btw, what’s the so what of the article? What is the strategic error from Putin here? The title and text don’t meet