India–Russia Ties After Jaishankar’s Moscow Visit: From Nostalgia to Necessity

The Kremlin may still provide the grand imagery. The annual summit may still produce the familiar warmth. But the future of India–Russia ties will be decided somewhere less cinematic: in customs rules, factories, shipping routes, payment networks, laboratories and boardrooms.

The India–Russia relationship has survived wars, sanctions, collapsing alliances and changing world orders. Its next test may be something less dramatic, and more difficult, which is economics.

The Kremlin can produce a powerful photograph in minutes. Fixing a payment mechanism can take months. The latter may matter more. This is the deeper message from External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s August 23–24 visit to Moscow. His meeting with Vladimir Putin naturally carried the symbolism of a relationship built over decades, but the more consequential story unfolded around the 27th session of the India–Russia Inter-Governmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Cooperation, or IRIGC-TEC.

This was not simply another reaffirmation of an old friendship. It was an attempt to make that friendship work harder in a world that has changed around it.

The Photograph Is Easy, the Plumbing Is Not

Jaishankar’s meeting with Putin came with a message from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a carefully sequenced diplomatic calendar. Modi looks forward to meeting Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, welcoming him to India for the BRICS Summit in September, and then holding the annual bilateral summit when mutually convenient.

The sequence matters because diplomacy is often sustained through repetition. Leaders meet, ministers consult, institutions keep talking, and disagreements are managed before they become ruptures. India and Russia have retained precisely this habit of engagement even as the international environment around them has become considerably less forgiving.

Putin also credited Modi’s personal attention for helping sustain the economic relationship, while acknowledging that trade had dipped slightly in 2025 before beginning to recover this year. Jaishankar, meanwhile, described the economic cooperation emerging from the commission as having grown “very significantly.”

Yet political warmth cannot conceal an economic problem. The old Moscow–Delhi story is not ending. But its next chapter will be written less in the language of nostalgia and more in the hard grammar of trade, technology and geopolitical necessity.

The USD 60 Billion Success That Comes With a Warning

On paper, the numbers look impressive. Bilateral goods trade has risen from roughly USD 13 billion in 2021–22 to nearly USD 60 billion in 2025–26, an increase of more than four times in five years. Yet the trade imbalance has widened from around USD 6.6 billion to more than USD 50 billion, changing the meaning of the headline.

For years, the natural instinct in bilateral diplomacy was to celebrate expanding trade. New Delhi is now asking a more uncomfortable question: what kind of trade is actually being created?

The shared ambition remains USD 100 billion in bilateral trade by 2030, but simply pushing a larger number through the existing structure would not solve the underlying problem. India wants greater market access for its own products, fewer tariff and non-tariff barriers, smoother payments and stronger participation by businesses on both sides. Jaishankar has made correcting the imbalance one of India’s foremost priorities.

That is why IRIGC-TEC matters. It is not glamorous diplomacy. It is where logistics bottlenecks, payment systems, connectivity, business access and implementation are supposed to be turned from talking points into working arrangements.

The previous session in August 2025 had already dealt with many of these obstacles, including connectivity, logistics, payment mechanisms and the Programme of Economic Cooperation through 2030. It also pushed for progress towards an India–Eurasian Economic Union Free Trade Agreement. The problem, then, is no longer identifying the machinery, but making the machinery move.

From Oil to Fertilisers, the Partnership Touches Ordinary Life

S Jaishankar with Sergey Lavrov

The diplomatic vocabulary of India–Russia ties has traditionally been dominated by defence. That pillar remains important, but the relationship extends into the less theatrical foundations of national resilience.

Energy is one such foundation. Fertilisers are another. Nuclear cooperation and high-technology engagement offer longer-term possibilities.

Putin’s assurance that Russia would continue doing everything necessary to meet India’s fertiliser requirements may sound modest beside a presidential meeting, but it reaches far beyond the diplomatic room. Russia’s commitment comes as global supply chains remain vulnerable to geopolitical disruption, while India must protect agricultural productivity and food security.

This is the quieter side of strategic partnership. It is found in the things that keep farms productive, factories running, and energy systems supplied.

The significance is mutual. India offers Russia a vast and consequential market at a time when Moscow’s economic relationships are being reshaped by geopolitical pressure. Russia, meanwhile, remains a major source of energy and critical commodities for an economy whose requirements will continue expanding. This makes the relationship transactional in some areas, strategic in others, and increasingly interdependent across both.

Autonomy Is Easier to Declare Than to Finance

India’s relationship with Russia also sits inside a much larger foreign-policy equation. New Delhi has deepened its engagement with the United States, Europe, Japan and other Indo-Pacific partners while retaining substantial ties with Moscow. These relationships are not designed as competing boxes into which India must place itself. They are instruments of national interest.

Autonomy is expensive when it is reduced to diplomatic rhetoric. It requires economic resilience, technological capability and enough tactical space to maintain relationships that may not always move in the same direction.

India and Russia do not agree on every international question. This has never been a prerequisite for their relationship. What has mattered is the existence of direct political channels through which disagreements can be understood and managed.

Jaishankar’s continuing engagement with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reflects precisely this habit. Their consultations have covered bilateral relations as well as the Ukraine conflict, West Asia and issues affecting Indian seafarers. Maintaining that channel does not mean endorsing every Russian position. It means refusing to surrender diplomatic space.

Moscow Is Only the Beginning of the Next Conversation

The timing of Jaishankar’s visit gives it another layer of significance. The 2026 SCO summit is scheduled for August 31 to September 1 in Kyrgyzstan, followed by the BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 12–13. Putin’s expected presence in India will give the relationship another high-profile setting within weeks of the Moscow discussions. The symbolism will be considerable, but the real test will come after the handshakes.

The real test now lies in whether Indian exporters can secure meaningful access to the Russian market, whether payment arrangements can become reliable enough for businesses to operate without excessive friction, and whether connectivity can make the movement of goods faster and more predictable. The private sector, too, will need a larger role in a relationship that has traditionally been driven by governments.

These may sound mundane beside the drama of geopolitics, but they are ultimately more decisive. A strategic partnership cannot remain balanced if trade continues to flow overwhelmingly in one direction, just as political trust cannot indefinitely compensate for commercial structures that fail to create opportunity on both sides.

The USD 100 billion trade target, therefore, should be viewed less as a trophy to be displayed than as an examination of whether the partnership can finally become economically reciprocal.

A Relationship That Needs Correction, Not Reinvention

There is a temptation to describe India–Russia ties either as an unbreakable friendship or as a relationship slowly losing relevance. Both readings are too simple.

The partnership has survived because it has adapted. The end of the Cold War did not destroy it. India’s growing partnership with Washington did not destroy it. The Russia–Ukraine conflict did not sever it. What has kept the relationship alive is not sentiment alone, but the ability of both governments to identify continuing interests beneath changing circumstances. Yet resilience should not become an excuse for inertia.

The next phase requires more economic traffic in both directions. It requires Indian exports to become more competitive in Russia, Russian investment to find deeper opportunities in India, payment systems to become easier, logistics to become more efficient, and scientific and technological cooperation to move beyond declarations.

The institutional architecture already exists. What it needs now is delivery.

This may be the most important distinction emerging from Moscow. India is not asking whether the relationship should survive. It is asking what the relationship should produce. And Russia has strong reasons to listen.

India is a major economy, an influential voice in the Global South and a power that has demonstrated its willingness to maintain independent relationships across competing centres of influence. For Moscow, that makes New Delhi valuable beyond the arithmetic of oil purchases or bilateral trade.

For India, Russia remains valuable precisely because it occupies a vital space that cannot simply be outsourced to another partner. The relationship, therefore, is neither a relic nor an automatic alliance. It is a working arrangement being rebuilt under pressure.

The Kremlin may still provide the grand imagery. The annual summit may still produce the familiar warmth. But the future of India–Russia ties will be decided somewhere less cinematic: in customs rules, factories, shipping routes, payment networks, laboratories and boardrooms. This is where strategic partnerships either become real or quietly become history.

Jaishankar’s Moscow visit showed that India and Russia understand the choice before them. The old relationship has enough political trust to endure. The harder question is whether it can acquire enough economic balance and institutional efficiency to thrive.

The handshake with Putin may have opened the news cycle. The spreadsheets, supply chains and payment systems will decide what comes after it.