On March 28, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that President Vladimir Putin would be visiting India. “Russian President Putin has accepted the invitation of the head of the Indian government,” Lavrov said, adding that preparations for the India visit were underway.
Putin’s visit will be his first to India since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Lavrov’s announcement raised eyebrows in diplomatic circles in India and abroad. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, Putin has visited only a handful of countries, especially since March 2023, when the Hague-based International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against the Russian president for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
Lavrov’s announcement came in a video address at a conference titled “Russia and India: Together Towards a New Bilateral Agenda” in Moscow.
No dates have been announced for the visit yet. However, The Diplomat has learned that the visit is likely to happen in the latter part of 2025, possibly between September and December.
By itself, a visit by Putin to India isn’t a big deal. The Russian president has visited the country often.
It is the changed global geopolitical, geo-economic and strategic contexts that give the visit significance, triggering curiosity and wariness around the event in the months to come. With the U.S. holding talks with Russia, it is no longer the pariah it was even six months ago.
Delhi and Moscow have been close friends since the Cold War, when India and the then Soviet Union had a strong diplomatic, strategic and economic relationship. Since 2000, India and Russia have been hosting annual summits of their leaders. This entails leaders of the two countries traveling to the other for talks. In fact, Russia was among the first countries with which India started the practice of leader-level annual summits.
Putin last visited India for such a summit in December 2021 – weeks before the start in February 2022 of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And the Indian Prime Minister visited Russia in July last year, after being re-elected for a third five-year term.
According to India’s Minister for External Affairs S. Jaishankar, India has a “Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership,” with Russia.
“For decades, Russia has had a salience in India’s national security calculus,” he said in a public lecture in January. “Currently, as Russia is redirecting its attention towards Asia… Deeper economic cooperation between India and Russia has a stabilizing consequence for the global economy,” he added.
The global geopolitical churn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars has deepened after Donald Trump again assumed office as U.S. president in January. His threats to impose tariffs on friends and foes alike, his remarks on annexing Greenland and Canada, and the initiation of bilateral talks with Russia to end the Ukraine war while largely ignoring the security concerns of Europe and Ukraine, have sent shockwaves around the world and especially impacted the U.S.’ NATO allies.
Lavrov’s remarks, which included praise for India “consistently” taking a “balanced position on the Ukrainian crisis” and for advocating its “resolution through dialogue,” indicate that the delicate high-wire diplomacy that India engaged in 2022 has paid off.
Although criticized by many Western countries, India maintained lines of communication with Russia and Ukraine, with Modi speaking to Putin as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the phone many times. However, Modi did not visit Russia for annual summits in 2022 and 2023. His meetings with Putin were confined to interactions on the margins of multilateral events. It was only in 2024 that Modi visited Russia to meet Putin. In September 2022, on the sidelines of a meeting with Eurasian countries, Modi expressed India’s discomfort over the conflict, telling Russian President Putin that “now is not an era of war.” This was welcomed in many Western capitals.
New Delhi’s careful diplomacy was aimed at ensuring Russia remained neutral during the four-year-long India-China military standoff in the Himalayas, as a significant portion of India’s military hardware is still of Russian origin, needing regular servicing and spares. This was important for India, especially since Russia and China had declared a “no limits” partnership in 2022, just days before the start of the conflict with Ukraine. India’s purchase of discounted Russian crude oil was also part of its strategy to keep Russia on its side as much as it aimed to keep fuel prices in its domestic markets steady.
Some in India argue that Ukraine is not India’s immediate security concern. “Given the grim security environment around India, we have higher priorities like the deterrence of China…Our diplomatic capital may be put to better use in other endeavors,” former Indian Army officer Raj Shukla said.
For India, it pays to have Russia on its side, especially with recent talk of a refreshed relationship among the U.S., Russia and China.
The reasoning in New Delhi is that Russia has always been either supportive or neutral but not detrimental in any crisis situation for India. It has recognized India’s primacy in South Asia, unlike China which has always sought to weaken India’s influence in its neighborhood. In the context of a transactional and unreliable Trump in the White House and the challenges vis-à-vis unresolved territorial issues with China, it would serve India well to have Russia in its corner.
India and Russia will need to add more economic content to buttress their strategic partnership. Currently, trade stands at $65-67 billion, thanks to India purchasing discounted oil from Russia. India has fretted over Russia’s ballooning trade surplus with New Delhi.
During Modi’s meeting with Putin in July last year, the two sides discussed how to achieve “balanced and sustainable bilateral trade in long term” with increased Indian exports to Russia and other steps like strengthening industrial cooperation, forging new technological and investment partnerships, especially in advanced high-technology areas. Both sides have set a $100-billion trade target by 2030.
Since Indian businesses see the U.S., Europe and the Gulf as more favorable markets and business destinations compared to Russia, realizing this target will be a challenge.
