India, Russia set to deepen defence ties with focus on technology sharing, joint production: Report

Hong Kong: India and Russia are seeking to deepen their decades-old defence relationship by moving beyond conventional arms sales towards greater technology and industrial cooperation, with missile exports and fighter-jet offers emerging as indicators of the evolving partnership, a report said this week, citing analysts.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Narendra Modi exchanged a handshake and warm embrace ahead of last weekend’s BRICS summit in New Delhi, with Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal describing the moment on social media as “A bond that keeps growing stronger!”

The meeting signalled a broader shift in India-Russia defence cooperation, analysts said, as New Delhi and Moscow explored greater collaboration in joint production, technology sharing and export-oriented weapons development, a report in South China Morning Post (SCMP) highlighted.

Srikumar Menon, a former Indian diplomat, told SCMP that discussions on BrahMos missile modernisation and Russia’s offer of technology transfer for Su-57 stealth fighter jets demonstrated “the growing maturity, depth and strategic sophistication” of the bilateral defence partnership.

India and Russia have set a USD 100 billion bilateral trade target for 2030, compared with about USD 60 billion currently.

Russia has traditionally supplied a large share of India’s military hardware, from tanks to fighter jets, but New Delhi has increasingly looked to France, the US and Israel for advanced defence technology and to diversify its supply chains amid the uncertainties due to the Russia-Ukraine war, the report mentioned.

“Russia has been hampered by Western sanctions since 2022 in accessing advanced components and technology, which in turn affected defence supplies to India,” Menon said.

According to the report, the shift has moved the relationship beyond a conventional buyer-seller model towards joint production, technology transfer and greater localisation under the “Make in India” programme launched in 2014.

The export success of BrahMos highlighted the changing nature of the partnership. The missile, which travels at three times the speed of sound and can be deployed from land, sea, air and underwater platforms, has found a growing market in a region increasingly concerned about maritime security, it noted.

The Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam have already signed agreements to acquire the system, while Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim told NDTV last Saturday that Kuala Lumpur was engaged in exploratory discussions of its own.

Speaking to SCMP, Srinivaasan Balakrishnan, Director of strategic engagements and partnerships at the Indic Researchers Forum, said that although no agreement for an advanced BrahMos variant was announced during the Putin-Modi meeting, it heightened “the political priority of the next generation BrahMos work that was already under way”.

According to Balakrishnan, the proposed upgrades cover a smaller, lighter variant of BrahMos designed for India’s Tejas jets, a submarine-launched variant and a hypersonic version that could travel at five times the speed of sound.

“The next step should be to move from jointly producing an existing weapon to jointly developing the next generation of weapons. If Moscow is genuinely prepared to deepen technology sharing, BrahMos could become the foundation for a much more ambitious Indian-Russian defence industrial partnership,” he told SCMP.

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