India–Russia relations

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  India-Russia relations stretch back centuries before any formal diplomatic machinery existed. In 1468, a Russian merchant named Afanasy Nikitin set out from his home city of Tver and spent years traveling through Persia and the Indian subcontinent, documenting everything he found: the people, the trade routes, the agriculture, the customs. His account, A Journey Beyond the Three Seas, became one of the earliest Russian records of India. That single journey planted a thread of curiosity between two civilizations that would, over the following five centuries, grow into one of the most durable bilateral partnerships in modern geopolitics. How did a relationship forged through medieval trade caravans become a strategic alliance worth tens of billions of dollars a year? What are the five pillars that hold it up? And what forces are now pulling at those pillars from below?

• 2. Merchants and Tsars

  ›

  The city of Astrakhan, in southern Russia, was a cosmopolitan trading hub by the 18th century. Indian merchants arrived there regularly, operating under privileges unlike anything they enjoyed elsewhere in the East. Members of the community paid just 12 rubles a year as rent for a shop in the Indian Trading Compound, and Russian authorities exempted them from taxes and duties altogether. In 1724, the value of goods they exported from Astrakhan into the interior cities of Russia exceeded 104,000 rubles, amounting to nearly a quarter of all trade moving through the city.

  Tsar Peter the Great had set this in motion. In 1696, he requested that Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb begin formal trade relations. Peter then personally granted an Indian trading company led by Anbu-Ram Mulin the right to resolve property disputes in Astrakhan. When Peter met Anbu Ram in 1722, he agreed to full free trade including transit rights. The governor of Astrakhan was ordered to show "kindness and goodwill" to the Indian merchants. This arrangement thrived until British colonial expansion ended independent Indian trade with Russia.

  Even before that commercial era, archaeological evidence from the Pazyryk site indicates nomadic peoples in the region were trading with India as far back as the 4th to 3rd century BCE. The relationship between these two civilizations was not born from diplomacy. It was born from commerce, curiosity, and the practical logic of the Silk Road.

• 3. The Soviet Years

  ›

  India's formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were established in April 1947, just weeks before Indian independence. As the Soviet newspaper Izvestia reported on the 15th of April 1947, both governments announced simultaneously in Moscow and New Delhi that they would exchange diplomatic missions at the level of embassies. The relationship moved quickly from formality to substance.

  In 1951, the USSR exercised its veto power in support of India on the Kashmir dispute at the United Nations. Two years later, Joseph Stalin told Indian diplomat Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan directly: "Both you and Mr. Nehru are persons whom we do not consider our enemies. This will continue to be our policy and you can count on our help."

  By 1955 the relationship had deepened visibly. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru visited the Soviet Union in June of that year, and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev made his return trip to India in the fall. Khrushchev publicly announced Soviet support for Indian sovereignty over Kashmir and over Portuguese coastal enclaves such as Goa. The Soviet Union was cultivating India as the anchor of its outreach to the non-aligned world, and the strategy was working.

  This closeness carried a price in Beijing. The Soviet Union's strong ties with India created strain with China throughout the Khrushchev era. When the Soviet Union agreed in 1962 to transfer technology allowing India to co-produce the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 jet fighter, the move was pointed: the Soviets had denied China the same technology. By 1960, India had received more Soviet assistance than China had.

  In 1965, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin brokered peace between India and Pakistan after their war over Kashmir, meeting with representatives of both countries and helping them negotiate an end to the fighting. Six years later, the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, signed in August 1971, gave India the strategic cover it needed during the conflict that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. When Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister, he traveled to the Soviet Union on his first state visit abroad, in May 1985, and signed two long-term economic agreements. That same year he developed a personal rapport with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev's first visit to any Third World state was his meeting with Rajiv Gandhi in New Delhi in late 1986.

• 4. The Strategic Partnership

  ›

  After the Soviet Union dissolved, Russia kept the same close ties with India intact. The first major political milestone came in October 2000, when President Vladimir Putin and Indian leaders signed a Declaration on Strategic Partnership. Putin later described this as "a truly historic step" in an article published in The Hindu. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, speaking during Putin's 2012 visit to India, called Putin "a valued friend of India and the original architect of the India-Russia strategic partnership".

  The Indo-Russian Inter-Governmental Commission, known as the IRIGC, became the main institutional engine of the relationship. It is divided into two parts: one covering trade, science, technology, and culture, co-chaired by the Russian Deputy Prime Minister and the Indian External Affairs Minister; the other covering military-technical cooperation, co-chaired by both countries' defence ministers. Both parts meet annually. Russia is one of only two countries in the world, the other being Japan, that has a mechanism for annual ministerial-level defence reviews with India.

  The five pillars that India's former Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai identified in a speech in Russia capture the architecture: politics, defence, civil nuclear energy, anti-terrorism cooperation, and space exploration. Each pillar has been reinforced by specific agreements. Russia has publicly supported India receiving a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, backed India's membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group and APEC, and expressed interest in joining SAARC as an observer, a body where India is a founding member.

• 5. Arms and the Alloy

  ›

  In 1997, Russia and India signed a ten-year agreement for military-technical cooperation covering a wide range of joint activities: purchasing completed weapons, joint research and development, joint production, and the joint marketing of armaments to third countries. The relationship was explicitly designed to go beyond buyer and seller.

  Between 2012 and 2016, Russia accounted for 68% of India's defence imports. Between 2013 and 2018 the figure stood at 62% of all arms sales to India. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia was India's largest arms supplier in both the 2013-17 and 2018-22 periods, though its share of total Indian arms imports fell from 64% to 45% during the latter period, with France emerging as the second largest supplier.

  Major joint programmes include the BrahMos cruise missile, a 50.5% Indian and 49.5% Russian joint venture; the Sukhoi Su-30MKI programme, with more than 230 aircraft contracted; and the KA-226T twin-engine utility helicopters, a joint venture to manufacture 60 in Russia and 140 in India. In 2012, both countries signed a defence deal worth $2.9 billion during Putin's visit to India for 42 new Sukhoi jets to be produced under licence by Hindustan Aeronautics.

  In October 2018, India signed an agreement worth $5.43 billion with Russia for five units of the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile defence system, ignoring American warnings and the potential for sanctions under the United States' CAATSA legislation. A deal signed in March 2025 saw India acquire advanced 1,000 HP engines for its Soviet-era T-72 tanks, including technology transfer for domestic production. Despite Russia's ongoing conflict in Ukraine, it delivered all contracted weapon systems, including the S-400, according to the agreed schedule.

• 6. Energy, Trade, and Ukraine

  ›

  In 2001, India's ONGC-Videsh acquired a 20% stake in the Sakhalin-I oil and gas project in Russia, investing about $1.7 billion. By the time of the source material, the same company had invested over $8 billion in Russian oil fields. In 2012, Gazprom and India's GAIL agreed to LNG shipments of 2.5 million tons a year for a period of 20 years.

  Bilateral trade stood at $1.5 billion in 2002 and grew more than seven times to $11 billion by 2012. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 then drove a dramatic acceleration. India began purchasing discounted Russian crude oil and fertilizers at scale. Within 2022, bilateral trade volume climbed from $13 billion to $27 billion. Russia had risen to become India's seventh largest trading partner, up from 25th the previous year. Russia's share of India's total trade volume increased from 1.27% to 3.54% in a single year. After January 2023, Russia became India's top oil supplier, replacing Iraq.

  In July 2024, Prime Minister Modi visited Moscow to meet Putin, his first trip to Russia in five years. The two embraced as Modi arrived, a gesture criticized by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy because it occurred on the same day Russian missiles struck a children's hospital in Kyiv. During the visit the two countries discussed nine strategic areas for closer economic cooperation, including nuclear energy and medicine, with a goal to significantly improve bilateral trade by 2030.

  Putin visited New Delhi on the 4th and the 5th of December 2025 for the 23rd India-Russia Annual Summit, hosted by Modi. By early 2026, however, U.S. sanctions targeting Russia's largest oil producers, Rosneft and Lukoil, had begun to disrupt India's oil trade, with several major Indian refineries halting purchases of Russian crude scheduled for loading in March and April. Some analysts have described a shift in the relationship: from a high-value strategic partnership toward something more transactional, as India pursued parallel agreements with the United States and Russia moved closer to China.

• 7. Space and the Stars

  ›

  India's first satellite, Aryabhata, was launched by the Soviet Union on the 19th of April 1975 from Kapustin Yar, carried aloft on a Kosmos-3M rocket. The satellite was named after an ancient Indian astronomer. The only Indian to visit space, Rakesh Sharma, also flew courtesy of the Soviet Union, under the Interkosmos program.

  During Putin's visit to India in December 2004, both countries signed two space-related agreements: one on cooperation in outer space for peaceful purposes, and one on collaboration with Russia's GLONASS satellite navigation system. In November 2007 they signed an agreement on joint lunar exploration.

  Chandrayaan-2 was initially conceived as a joint Indian-Russian mission, proposed by ISRO and the Russian Federal Space Agency with a projected cost of 4.25 billion rupees, equivalent to roughly $90 million. Russia was to build the lander; India the orbiter and rover. Repeated delays on the Russian side ultimately led India to develop its own lander, named Vikram, and bear all costs itself. ISRO launched Chandrayaan-2 independently on the 22nd of July 2019 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh.

  In February 2020, Glavkosmos JSC and ISRO began training Indian Air Force pilots as part of an agreement to prepare India for crewed spaceflight. The candidates studied the Russian language, the Soyuz spacecraft systems, and underwent physical and medical training. In October 2022, Glavkosmos supplied India with systems and equipment for the Gaganyaan crewed spacecraft, including spacesuits, armchairs, and lodgments produced by the Russian JSC Zvezda enterprise. The completion of cosmonaut training was announced by Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin in March 2021.

• 8. Culture Across Centuries

  ›

  Gerasim Lebedev studied ancient Indian languages in the 1780s, making him one of Russia's earliest serious scholars of India. Nicholas Roerich came later, absorbing Indian philosophy, the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, and the Bhagavad Gita. The 130th anniversary of Roerich's birth and the 100th anniversary of his son Svetoslav Roerich were celebrated in India in October 2004. Leading Russian scholars known as Indiologists, including Ivan Minayev, Sergey Oldenburg, Fyodor Shcherbatskoy, and Yuri Knorozov, devoted their careers to the Indus Script, Sanskrit, and Indian literature.

  In cinema, Indian and Soviet audiences shared a genuine affection for each other's films. Popular Indian films in the USSR included Awara, Bobby, Barood, Mamta, and Disco Dancer. Soviet actor Oleg Strizhenov and Hindi screen legend Nargis Dutt starred together in the 1950s film Journey Beyond Three Seas, based on Afanasy Nikitin's account of his travels. In 2010, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, known as a Bollywood enthusiast, visited the set of Yash Raj Studios and met Yash Chopra, Shah Rukh Khan, and Kareena Kapoor during a state visit to India. He stated that Russia and India were the only countries where satellite channels broadcast Indian films around the clock.

  Russia's Rossotrudnichestvo Representative Office, established in 1965, operates five Russian Centres of Science and Culture across India, in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, and Trivandrum. The University of Moscow maintains a Hindi Department, and there are five chairs related to Indology spread across universities in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan, and Vladivostok. A 2014 BBC World Service Poll found that 85% of Russians viewed India positively.