Press
It’s about weapons, oil – and a common neighbor: Narendra Modi’s first foreign trip after his re-election takes the Indian Prime Minister to the Kremlin, of all places.
Perhaps it was just a scheduling issue, or perhaps it was a deliberate affront. When the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) met in Astana in the middle of the week, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent his foreign minister ahead, while heads of state from China, Russia and Iran flew to the Kazakh steppe. The organisation does not seem to be that important to Modi, and Modi is reluctant to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, the driving force behind the SCO. The two countries have been arguing for decades about the course of their shared border, and bloody skirmishes in the Himalayas keep breaking out.
Meeting with dictators and autocrats is not a problem for Modi: On Monday, the 73-year-old is expected in Moscow for two days of talks with Wladimir PutinWhile Western countries in particular have distanced themselves from the Kremlin since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Modi has no reservations about dealing with Putin. This is Modi’s first trip to Moscow since the war began and his first trip abroad since he was re-elected a few weeks ago. After the last two elections, he always flew to neighboring countries first. For Moscow, Modi’s visit – his first to Russia in five years – is a diplomatic victory, showing that the Kremlin is anything but isolated internationally, even more than two years after the war began.
India and Russia: only cautious criticism of the Ukraine war
Modi has never explicitly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nor has his government joined the Western sanctions against Russia. India did take part in the peace conference in Switzerland a few weeks ago, but did not agree to the final declaration. At least: At his last meeting with Putin, on the sidelines of an SCO meeting in Uzbekistan two years ago, Putin told the Kremlin ruler that they were “not living in an era of war.”
Security issues are now to be discussed in Moscow, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and economic cooperation is also at the top of the agenda. Modi and Putin have a “very trusting” relationship. The Indian side said that questions of military cooperation would also be discussed.
Weapons are a major reason why India – the world’s most populous country and largest democracy – is not moving away from the Kremlin. The Indian Air Force currently has more than 400 fighter jets and dozens of Russian or Soviet-made submarines, tanks and helicopters. Modi is trying to diversify his arms purchases through contracts with countries such as Italy, Israel, France and the USA, but India will still be dependent on Russian spare parts and Russian know-how for the existing material for decades to come.
India is dependent on Russian oil
India is even more dependent on Russian oil than on Russian weapons. In 2021, the year before the war began, only two percent of India’s crude oil imports came from Russia. Because Moscow has sought new buyers as a result of Western sanctions and has significantly reduced the price of its oil, the share has recently risen to 38 percent. India is the world’s third-largest consumer of crude oil, and the discount deal with the Kremlin has saved the country around 13 billion US dollars in just under two years, according to a study by the Indian rating agency ICRA.
The fact that Narendra Modi is travelling to Moscow for the first time since 2019 is probably also due to the new closeness between Russia and China. Shortly before the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine, Putin and Xi Jinping entered into a “boundless friendship”, trade between the two countries recently rose to a record high, and Chinese companies are supporting Russia’s war with goods that can be used for military purposes. Modi has been eyeing the development with suspicion for some time, and his visit to Moscow is now intended to prevent the Russians from finally slipping into the Chinese orbit. From an Indian perspective, the Russian-Chinese cozy course is “like the best friend sleeping with the enemy”, Swasti Rao from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi told the news agency Bloomberg.
Modi’s difficult balancing act: friend of Russia – and the West
At the same time, Modi also wants to be good friends with the West. India is a member of the Quad, a loose military alliance that also includes the USA, Japan and Australia. Last summer, Modi was also received in the USA by US President Joe Biden for a rare state visit. For the West, India is the democratic alternative to China, and the first companies are shifting their production from the People’s Republic to the subcontinent. However, Modi’s increasingly authoritarian style of government is causing discontent in the West; during the election campaign, he had stirred up sentiment against India’s approximately 200 million Muslims.
Modi will hardly have to listen to such criticism in the Kremlin.
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