• By Harsh V. Pant and Alexey Zakharov

Despite pressure from the United States, India-Russia ties are neither likely to significantly expand nor diminish.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is expected to visit New Delhi on December 5–6. This will be his first trip to India in four years, marking the restoration of regular India-Russia summits. The agenda of the upcoming summit is quite extensive, covering a wide range of discussion points and potential deals in energy, defense, civil aviation, critical minerals, investment projects, and labour migration.

The India-Russia Relationship: From Lull to Restart

The war in Ukraine emerged as a serious challenge for Indian foreign policy, forcing New Delhi to follow a delicate balancing act in its relations with Russia and the West. Between February 2022 and July 2024, it seemed that New Delhi’s approach boiled down to keeping low-key official interactions while retaining a mutually beneficial economic partnership with Moscow, particularly in energy.

While India avoided any political fanfare in the relationship and focused on pointed discussions of bilateral and global issues, bilateral trade figures kept rising. Trade turnover skyrocketed from a mere $13.1 billion in FY2021–22 to $68.7 billion in FY2024–25, raising hopes among officials of hitting a new target of $100 billion in the near future. The growth was largely due to Russia’s emergence as India’s largest oil supplier, accounting for 35 percent of India’s total oil imports by value.

What followed Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s visits to Moscow and Kazan in July and October 2024, respectively, was a full-scale unlocking of bilateral ties. Apart from Russian crude oil continuing to flow uninterrupted to Indian refineries despite external hurdles, India and Russia also managed to restart substantive defense cooperation discussions.

In the logic of Indian careful balancing, this area was previously regarded as off-limits owing to Washington’s “red lines” exemplified by the threat of Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). What went largely unnoticed amid US president Donald Trump’s tariff onslaught and restrictions on Russia’s oil revenues was New Delhi’s quiet reengagement with the Russian defense sector, which has led to several tentative agreements.

Deals reportedly in the pipeline or already signed include the joint development of Pantsir air defense system and India’s potential procurement of the Voronezh early warning radar system with a range of over 6000 kilometres. Additionally, throughout Operation Sindoor, Russian air defense systems proved their effectiveness. Indian Air Chief Marshal AP Singh even dubbed the Russian S-400 air defense system “a game-changer.” New Delhi has shown interest in acquiring an additional batch of S-400 units. However, the delivery schedule for the remaining units under the previous contract has missed its targets and has been postponed until 2026. This means that India can hardly expect their expedited induction into its air defense network.

Trade cooperation will dominate the agenda of the India-Russia summit. The period of rapid growth of trade turnover has arguably reached its peak. Although the latest US sanctions against the two largest Russian oil companies (Rosneft and Lukoil) are unlikely to halt India’s energy ties with Russia completely, they will obviously dissuade globalized Indian businesses from future transactions, thereby shrinking India’s crude imports from Russia. And if crude oil and petroleum supplies are reduced, this will significantly limit the upward trajectory of trade figures. With the future of oil imports clouded in uncertainty, the summit’s focus will be on enabling Indian exports to Russia, particularly in pharmaceuticals, machinery, and agricultural products.

Trump’s Pressure on India and Modi’s Response

The starting period of Trump’s presidency has turned into a bumpy road for India-US ties. Although New Delhi was willing to accommodate many of President Trump’s demands, including the increased purchases of American energy resources and arms, such flexibility did not prevent it from becoming the target of the Liberation Day tariffs. This was followed by Trump’s intervention in the India-Pakistan conflict, proclaiming himself as the main force behind the ceasefire. His insistence on a key role in mediating between India and Pakistan has become a thorn in the side of Indian diplomacy, prompting New Delhi to refute these claims repeatedly.

On top of that, as the US-Russia negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine have not led to any tangible progress, the United States has turned to putting pressure on Moscow through its closest economic partners. This resulted in India’s inclusion within the Russia-related sanctions programme, with a cumulative 50 percent tariff imposed on a range of its goods. The imposed measures have impacted several Indian industries, including agriculture, automobile manufacturing, aluminium and steel production, copper processing, and textiles.

Resolving this issue has become a two-step problem for New Delhi. First, negotiating a trade deal that accommodates the US demands to narrow the trade imbalance and provide more market access to American exports while defending its own producers; and second, cutting down oil imports from Russia in a manner not detrimental to national interests. Reports indicate that the Indo-US trade talks are progressing well, with the first phase “nearing closure.”

Over the past several weeks, India’s imports of US oil have been rising. The Indian state-owned oil companies have signed a one-year contract to import around 2.2 million tons per annum of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) from the United States, nearly 10 percent of India’s annual LPG imports. Concurrently, India’s imports of Russian oil are declining due to the fears of secondary sanctions, particularly among private Indian refineries.

The contours of a trade deal are hardly the end of the story, though, with other Russia-related roadblocks in the way of recalibrating the India-US ties. With the US-Russia dialogue on the brink of falling apart, India is set to stay in the firing line of US anti-Russia measures. As Trump seeks more ways to compel Russia to end the war in Ukraine, it is likely that the US Congress will pass the legislation entailing “very severe sanctions” on the countries doing business with Russia.

The Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 proposes a mechanism to impose 500 percent duties on countries that “knowingly” purchase or transfer Russian-origin oil, uranium, natural gas, petroleum, or petrochemical products. As the US president will have the final decision-making authority over these measures, the bill could become a Damocles’ sword over India, further straining its energy imports from Russia. Moreover, while India explores major new defense deals with Russia, the threat of secondary sanctions under CAATSA remains persistent, and the Trump administration might invoke them to derail the resurgent India-Russia defense partnership.

While the Indian government has been circumspect about resolving issues with the United States, Trump’s public diplomacy with New Delhi has created several fault lines between the two countries. The manner in which the American president and some of his senior advisers have disparaged India with their comments has become a domestic liability for Modi, constraining his options for furthering the India-US agenda as he did in his first two terms.

Since the United States remains a crucial partner for India across defense, technology, trade, and investment, the bilateral engagement will undoubtedly continue. However, the recent controversies that have made deep inroads into the public consciousness will erode trust in the India-US relationship.

Meanwhile, Putin’s visit is poised to reinforce Russia’s position in India. For New Delhi, the narrative of Russia as a “time-tested partner” plays an important role in domestic messaging that India’s foreign policy is consistent and remains insulated from external shocks. For this reason, India will continue to invest in its partnership with Russia even though the underlying conditions sustaining the relationship are not that strong, and multiple issues prevent the partnership from expanding. The outcomes of Putin’s visit will therefore be as much about sending a signal to the United States as about assuaging domestic concerns that India will not buckle under pressure from Trump.

About the Authors: Harsh Pant and Aleksei Zakharov

Harsh V. Pant is the vice president for studies and foreign policy at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) based in New Delhi. He is also a professor of International Relations at King’s India Institute at King’s College London. He is also Director (Honorary) of Delhi School of Transnational Affairs at Delhi University.

Aleksei Zakharov is a fellow with ORF’s Strategic Studies Programme. His research focuses on the geopolitics and geo-economics of Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific, with particular emphasis on Russia’s foreign policy towards South Asia and India-Russia relations. Previously, Aleksei was a Post-doctoral Fellow at HSE University, Moscow, and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.