The India-Russia-US Triangle: Walking the Tightrope Through a Realigning World

India’s relationship with Russia, forged through decades of Cold War-era defence and diplomatic cooperation, persists with notable resilience even as India simultaneously deepens economic, technological, and defence ties with the United States at a pace that would have seemed improbable a generation ago. Understanding why India maintains both relationships in apparent tension, rather than choosing decisively between them, requires examining the distinct and largely non-overlapping strategic functions each relationship serves.

What Russia Still Provides

Despite reduced new defence procurement from Russia in recent years, the Indian armed forces remain substantially dependent on Russian-origin platforms for spare parts, maintenance, and upgrades across a large share of existing military hardware, a legacy dependency built over decades that cannot be unwound quickly without considerable operational risk. Russia has also historically provided India with certain advanced defence technology, including in missile and submarine systems, on terms that Western suppliers have been less willing to extend, whether due to technology transfer restrictions or strategic caution about enabling certain Indian military capabilities.

What the United States Now Provides

The deepening India-US relationship serves substantially different strategic functions: access to advanced technology in areas including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and jet engine co-production that Russia could not realistically offer even before its own technology sector came under sustained sanctions pressure following the Ukraine invasion; a shared strategic interest in managing China’s regional assertiveness, particularly along the disputed Himalayan border and in the broader Indo-Pacific maritime domain; and substantial economic ties, including trade volumes and a large Indian diaspora presence in the United States, that have no comparable scale in the India-Russia relationship.

Why India Resists Choosing

India’s consistent position, articulated by successive governments across the political spectrum, is that these relationships address different strategic needs and need not be mutually exclusive, a position that Indian officials describe as multipolarity rather than fence-sitting. Western pressure, particularly from the United States, for India to more clearly align against Russia following the Ukraine invasion has been met with polite but firm resistance, reflecting India’s calculation that the costs of antagonising a long-standing defence partner outweigh the diplomatic benefits of more explicit alignment with Western sanctions policy, particularly given the immediate, tangible defence maintenance dependencies involved.

India’s position is not that it is indifferent to the Ukraine war’s consequences, but that it calculates the costs of choosing sides more heavily than many Western partners calculate the costs of India continuing not to choose.

The Sustainability Question

This balancing act has proven more durable than many analysts initially predicted following the Ukraine invasion, but its long-term sustainability depends on factors largely outside India’s control: the trajectory of US-Russia relations, the pace and severity of sanctions pressure on Russia’s economy and defence industrial base, and the degree to which China-Russia alignment deepens in ways that might eventually force India into starker choices than it has faced thus far. For now, India’s tightrope walk continues, sustained by the genuine, largely non-competing strategic value each relationship provides, even as the broader global environment in which that balancing act occurs grows steadily less accommodating of such careful ambiguity.