Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made his first official trip to Russia in five years, under the growing shadow of the Russian-Chinese military alliance over his own country. The Indian leader has come to the Russian capital on a two-day visit to discuss with Russian President Vladimir Putin a complicated geopolitical game with many facets. One, the purchase of Russian oil at a bargain price – due to Western sanctions, which limit imports of Russian crude to a minimum due to the invasion of Ukraine; and another, Moscow’s growing military cooperation with Beijing in the face of New Delhi’s rapprochement with Washington.
“We look forward to further deepening our countries’ special and privileged strategic partnership, especially in future areas of cooperation,” the Indian prime minister said on Twitter’s new brand X upon his arrival in Moscow. The two leaders held their first informal meeting on Monday afternoon, during which they congratulated each other on their second term in office, with Modi in office since 2014 and Putin since the end of 1999.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has compared the West’s attention to Modi’s visit to a fit of jealousy. “Jealousy means keeping a close watch, and keeping a close watch means attaching great importance. And here they are not mistaken: there is something to attach great importance to,” Peskov said.
However, there is not complete agreement with Moscow. India made a gesture to kyiv and was present at the peace summit for Ukraine held in mid-June in Switzerland. New Delhi did not sign up to the proposal of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, but it does not recognise either the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 or the occupation of the rest of Ukrainian territories. “A peace agreement is possible if it is acceptable to the parties to the conflict,” said the head of the Indian delegation, Shri Pavan Kapoor, after pointing out that Russia did not attend that summit.
India has also expressed its anger at Moscow in recent months over the recruitment of its citizens for the invasion of Ukraine. New Delhi acknowledged the death of at least two people in June, and a month earlier it dismantled a network recruiting people on its streets through fake job offers in Russia. For its part, the newspaper The World revealed in February that dozens of unemployed people in rural India were recruited through other scams through companies based in Dubai.
India is walking a delicate balance between the West and Moscow. Putin and Modi have discussed an alternative for payments between the two countries as Russian banks were cut off from the Swift system following the start of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine and at the same time their trade has skyrocketed. India has its own banking system, RuPay, and Russia promoted its Mir model, although the latter has also been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department and any third-country entity using it can also be punished.
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India has been one of the countries that has benefited most from sanctions against Russia. New Delhi buys oil from Moscow at bargain prices and refines it for its domestic market and then resells it to the West. Trade between the two countries has thus multiplied from around $10 billion (9.23 billion euros) before the war to $65 billion in 2023, of which $54 billion is Indian crude oil imports. However, Russia only receives foreign currency from India, as the Asian power’s exports of goods have barely increased from $3 billion to $4 billion in this time.
The U.S. Treasury Department has also not banned imports of Russian crude as long as its customers stick to the $60-a-barrel cap imposed by Washington. The reason is that its price could skyrocket if supply suddenly shrinks, which could even benefit Russia if it sells less, but at a much higher price. “It is important to keep the supply of oil on the market. What we want is to limit Putin’s profit,” Treasury adviser Eric Van Nostrand told Reuters in April.
The Chinese shadow
This is the first face-to-face between Modi and Putin since September 2022, and it is another turn to the squaring of the triangle between Russia, India and China in which these last two countries fight their own cold war. Both nations share more than 3,300 kilometers of border and the status of nuclear powers, and when the whole planet looked towards Ukraine in 2022, both States engaged in new border clashes in the Himalayas with several deaths, a constant that also happened in 2020 and 2021.
The Indian prime minister has decided to travel to Moscow as Beijing and the Kremlin crystallise what they have called a “new era” in their strategic partnership. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Modi and Putin had only met in person in September 2022, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. By comparison, the leaders of Russia and China visited each other twice in 2023, in Moscow and Beijing, and this year Putin made another official trip to the Chinese capital in May. In addition, the Russian president and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, have met more times in international forums such as the SCO summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, on 3 July.
“The growing closeness between Russia and China is bound to create unrest in India,” Nivedita Kapur, an expert on international relations at the Higher School of Economics in Russia, told this newspaper by email. She noted that “the new challenges from China have also made India become an active member of the Quad alliance (the United States, India, Australia and Japan) and promote cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, much to Russia’s dismay.”
“Russia has so far been very careful to maintain its neutrality in the disputes between India and China,” she explains, “and New Delhi is interested in maintaining close ties with Moscow: due to its geography and Eurasian projection, India does not want to create a situation in which Russia is left alone with China as a viable partner or ends up in an alliance between the two.”
At the same time, India is upgrading an army whose backbone was once based on Soviet weapons with Western equipment. “India’s relationship with the West stands on its own. The diversification in defence undertaken several years ago has seen France, the United States, Israel and other countries emerge as important partners for India alongside Russia,” says Kapur. “The high level of dependence on a single partner (Russia) was not desirable, although the partnership with Moscow remains important,” emphasises the expert in international relations.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mentioned at a forum in June an old idea from the 1990s of his predecessor Yevgeny Primakov: the Russia-China-India platform. “It is not meeting now, it is not our fault, but there are plans to bring back this format,” Lavrov said.
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