The recent Modi–Putin summit in New Delhi defied expectations, focusing on economic cooperation rather than anticipated defense deals. In a rapidly shifting world, Russia and India face critical strategic choices, with economics and geography shaping their future path.
The Cradle
The objectives and timeline bridge general ideas to concrete action. They flesh out the process to set the stage for a detailed plan, ensuring that everyone across the top echelons of the leadership is on the same page in grasping the full import of the event. Only then can they deep-dive into execution. This allows the summit to unfold like a symphony – complex, beautiful, and harmonious, coming together in an orchestrated progression where subtle details build into a powerful whole.
But surprises can still be in store. The meticulously choreographed recent summit in Delhi on Thursday, 4 December, between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin was one such case, as if the fizz had gone out of the bottle even before the curtain came down.
Defense cooperation, the first circle of the Russian–Indian relationship, did not even figure as a key outcome of the summit. The Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri claimed that he wasn’t aware of what transpired at the meeting between the two defense ministers on the sidelines of the summit.
Kremlin-funded RT had reported with a beaming headline just a day before Putin sat down for a one-on-one with Modi at the latter’s private residence over a meal, ‘Putin goes to India: From fighter jets to trade routes, massive deals are on offer.’
RT’s authoritative forecast, under the byline of a retired Indian air marshal, even drew a parallel to the Soviet Union’s critical help to India in 1971 against the backdrop of “insurance against the potential US or Chinese threat to support Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani war.”
It listed as likely focus areas during Putin’s visit, additional S-400 missiles, the S-500 AD system, R-37M long-range air-to-air missiles to be integrated on the Su-30 MKI, and forecast that “Discussions on the Make-in-India Russian Su-57 may be the flagship subject on the table.”
However, an inane readout by the Indian Defense Ministry following the meeting between Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and his visiting Russian counterpart Andrei Belousov on 4 December largely dwelt on their warm opening remarks and concluded tamely. The high pitch of the RT report was echoed in an Izvestia report on the same day (3 December), titled ‘Relatives in touch: Putin will take cooperation with India to a new level.’ The report attributed to the Russian Foreign Ministry stated, “Despite western pressure, defense cooperation is also likely to develop: contracts for the supply of Su-57, S-400, and even S-500 missiles are possible.”
The report added, “Russia and India are global players and largely determine international security. As the Russian Foreign Ministry told Izvestia, the parties are also discussing the future Eurasian Charter on Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century.” Izvestia added that “joint work on a future Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century could further align Moscow and New Delhi's positions.”
First stirrings in the air
Evidently, something changed dramatically in the Kremlin's thinking on the night of 2 December as India slept, after two top American envoys visited Putin for an extraordinary five-hour meeting.
What happened? The answer needs some explaining – for if only we factor in that the contemporary world situation is in a historic transition and nothing in this world is anymore as reliable as change, one may get a sense of it.
The epochal shifts that began surfacing in the recent weeks in the correlation of forces internationally — to borrow from the Marxian idiom in the intellectual tradition marked by critical evaluation and keeping out political or apologetic filiation — are steadily surging.
The first signs of the stirrings in the air came when the Director of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, began his two-day visit to Russia on 1 December. As announced by Xinhua News Agency, Wang Yi planned to travel to Moscow to participate in the next 20th round of regular consultations on strategic security with Russian counterparts.
Xinhua implied that it was a scheduled visit, but it overlapped with the hastily arranged arrival in Moscow of the high-powered American team comprising US special envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on 2 December.
What was breathtaking is that Wang had to depart from Moscow after the consultations without a meeting with Putin, although Kremlin officials didn’t have to be rocket scientists to know that Wang would have to report to Chinese President Xi Jinping what he gleaned from Putin on the latest state of play in the presidential US–Russia tango and the steady warming up of the Russian–American relationship with a critical mass accruing to the negotiations to coordinate an enduring Ukraine settlement that accommodates Moscow’s stated concerns.
Wang’s primary purpose would have been a meeting with Putin, which he usually had, as Russians knew well enough that he is a crucial figure in Beijing’s policy-making apparatus. Putin’s emissaries are unfailingly received by Xi even during “working visits”.
But responding to a query on 1 December, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin had no plans to meet with Wang, as he had a busy schedule, “especially since high-level Russian–Indian contacts are scheduled for the second half of the week,” – referring to the Russian president's visit to India on 4–5 December.
Peskov’s remark can be put in perspective only in terms of the firm mutual commitment by Moscow and Washington that Witkoff’s talks with Kremlin officials, having reached a crucial stage, should remain strictly confidential (notably, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also did not accompany Putin to Delhi).
Promises to keep
Moscow has every reason to feel pleased with the tempo and directions of the confidential exchanges with the Trump administration, as well as the overall drift of the Ukraine peace process, which is now coming to grips with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a separate entity independent of his European associates, including the European Union and NATO – although the Kiev regime is tottering.
Russia gets a deal here insofar as even if the Kiev regime and the “coalition of the willing” in Europe remain irreconcilable, it would have a free hand to force a military solution, given the US's decoupling from the proxy war. Previously special assistant to former US president Ronald Reagan and veteran commentator on foreign policy issues, Doug Bandow at the Cato Institute (an influential think tank in Republican Party circles) wrote recently, "Unwilling or unable to stick with a realistic peace plan, the [US] president should act on his earlier instincts and walk away from the conflict. The Russo–Ukraine war is a tragedy but poses no threat to America, let alone one warranting a commitment to go to war against nuclear-armed Russia should hostilities revive."
Meanwhile, amidst all this geopolitical maneuvering, Trump chose last Friday to unveil his administration’s National Security Strategy [NSS]. How far Russia or India could anticipate the ensuing shock and awe may never be known, but it stands to reason that they had some inkling of the impending earthquake.
The sensational NSS document augurs well for the trajectory of the US’s ties with both Russia and India – Russia even more so. The NSS characterises the Ukraine settlement and improvement of relations with Russia as in the “core interests” of the US. Even more important, it all but recognises Russia’s resurgence as a superpower and key partner in maintaining the global strategic balance.
Furthermore, it envisages the re-deployment of the US military in the Western Hemisphere as the top priority, which implies a reduction of forces in Europe and a downgrading of the transatlantic system as such. This is a radical departure from the doctrine of the “The Grand Chessboard,” famously espoused by Zbigniew Brzeziński (borrowed from Halford Mackinder’s so-called Heartland theory based on the geopolitical conception of the globe as divided into two camps), which has been the platform on which the US anchored its foreign policy strategy through the better part of the post-World War era up until former US president Joe Biden's administration.
The US neoconservative flagship in Europe, POLITICO, published a bitter obituary titled ‘Trump’s new strategy marks the unraveling of the Western alliance,’ lamenting that the NSS document “doesn’t even cast Russia as an adversary.” POLITICO writes:
“No wonder Kremlin spokesperson Dimitry Peskov welcomed the NSS as a ‘positive step’ and ‘largely consistent’ with Russia's vision … While Beijing and Moscow appear satisfied with the NSS, the document reserves its harshest language and sharpest barbs for America's traditional allies in Europe.”
Evidently, Russia and India have been put on the spot to make some fundamental choices – and quickly. That would have been the thought uppermost in the minds of Modi and Putin as their summit ended Friday night with a joint statement that underscored the centrality of economic cooperation going forward.
Indeed, the woods ahead are lovely, dark, and deep, but Modi and Putin have promises to keep. Unsurprisingly, they took a detour to build up their meagre economic ties, which is a prerequisite to navigate the challenges of a brave new world where geoeconomics could be the leitmotif and potentially its lodestar.
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