India’s Narendra Modi visits Vladimir Putin to strengthen ties in China protection

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Narendra Modi will hold formal talks with President Vladimir Putin in Russia on Tuesday as India’s prime minister seeks to strengthen relations and quell concerns about Moscow’s rapprochement with China.

Putin hosted Modi on Monday at his suburban residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside Moscow, where the two held informal talks over tea and took a walk in the park. More formal talks are expected on Tuesday.

Modi hailed the two-day visit as a “wonderful opportunity to deepen ties” in a post on social media platform X, adding that it would “certainly go a long way in further cementing the friendly ties between India and Russia”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticized Modi for the visit, calling it “a big disappointment.”

“It is a great disappointment and a devastating blow to peace efforts to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy embrace the world’s bloodiest criminal in Moscow,” Zelenskyy wrote in X. Russian dam on Monday, an attack that targeted a children’s hospital in Kiev and civilian and critical infrastructure elsewhere killed at least 38 people, including four children, and wounded 190 others, he said early Tuesday.

India’s ties with Russia have become particularly important to New Delhi as Western sanctions designed to isolate Russia over the war in Ukraine have pushed Moscow closer to China © Gavril Grigorov/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

The trip is Modi’s first since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia has been trying to rally countries including India behind Putin’s vision of a Moscow-led “global majority” to challenge US hegemony.

IndiaMeanwhile, it has avoided taking sides in the war in an effort to protect a decades-old relationship with Russia, its largest arms supplier and — since the conflict began — a significant source of cheap oil.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Western countries were “jealous… and rightly so” that Modi had chosen Russia for his first bilateral visit. after India’s electionin which Modi won a third five-year term last month.

India’s ties with Russia have become particularly important to New Delhi as Western sanctions designed to isolate Russia have pushed Moscow closer to China. Beijing has provided Moscow with an economic lifeline, increasing bilateral trade to record levels and becoming a critical supplier to Russia of Western-made components with potential battlefield uses.

“India wants to give Russia room to maneuver,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “They may not have the levers to pull Russia away from China, but they want to give it as many opportunities as possible to prevent them from putting all their eggs in the Chinese basket.”

India is also involved with China in a standoff along disputed Himalayan borderand sees Russia’s neutrality as vital to national security, officials said. “China is the main challenge,” said Pankaj Saran, a former Indian ambassador to Russia. “We really cannot afford to do something that turns a friend into an adversary.”

Trade between India and Russia has surged to more than $65 billion since Moscow’s full-scale invasion, largely due to a sharp increase discounted oil purchases. Russian crude accounted for 43% of India’s oil imports in June, according to data provider Vortexa, making it the second-largest buyer after China.

This has led to a sharp trade imbalance. India’s foreign secretary, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, told reporters ahead of Modi’s trip that New Delhi wanted to increase agricultural and pharmaceutical exports to Russia.

The sanctions have also complicated Moscow’s ability to repatriate oil revenues due to the low convertibility of the rupee. US repression has prompted banks to drastically reduce costs with Russian counterparties, limiting their access to certain currencies and forcing traders to conduct transactions in rubles or even trade for goods, according to financiers involved in the deal.

The US and EU have also stepped up efforts to target the fleet carrying Russian oil, leaving buyers like India vulnerable to possible future sanctions.

“Global banks will be hesitant to touch any transactions that could expose them to enforcement actions by the U.S.,” said Benjamin Hilgenstock at the Kyiv School of Economics Institute. “An expanded tanker designation campaign could become a problem for Indian buyers.”

India and Russia are trying to promote domestic payment systems for trade, but doing so on a large scale will be difficult due to limited capacity as well as the challenge of exchanging rubles and rupees for dollars and euros, he added.

Some analysts said Modi’s visit obscured the fact that India was increasingly staking its future on economic and military cooperation with the West.

Russia’s share of Indian arms imports fell to a near 60-year low between 2019 and 2023, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, as India sought more sophisticated military technology from countries including the US and Israel.

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Kwatra said Modi would also raise concerns about scores of his citizens unintentionally recruited in the Russian army to fight in Ukraine.

Moscow’s growing dependence on Chinese supplies for its arms industry has created another concern for India, said Carnegie Center’s Gabuev, due to concerns that Moscow cannot maintain weapons systems or sell new weapons without Chinese supply of components.

“The substantial part of the relationship is on a very fragile footing,” said Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, head of South Asia at consultancy Eurasia Group. “I would say this is a managed decline.”

Additional reporting by Christopher Miller in Lviv and Isobel Koshiw in Kyiv

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