NEW DELHI — There was no lack of bonhomie when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin met this fall in China. The two hugged, smiled and spent some 45 minutes chatting in Putin’s bulletproof black limousine.
As the Russian leader arrived in New Delhi on Thursday for the start of a two-day state visit, Modi was confronted with a delicate diplomatic challenge, analysts say: seeking to uphold his country’s partnership with Moscow without riling President Donald Trump, who has punished India for purchasing oil from Russia and fueling its “war machine” in Ukraine.
It is Putin’s first trip to India since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, and comes two days after he held lengthy and inconclusive talks with American negotiators in Moscow about winding down the conflict. Modi has avoided condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine while expressing sympathy for Kyiv and support for international peace efforts.
The two delegations will be keen to keep the focus on bilateral issues, especially trade, which has swelled from $10.1 billion before the pandemic to $68.7 billion in the last fiscal year, largely due to India’s imports of Russian crude. But facing pressure from Trump, and recently tightened U.S. and European sanctions on Moscow’s energy sector, Indian refiners have begun to limit their oil purchases from Russia, which analysts say is a significant blow to the country’s wartime economy. Defense deals could help fill the gap: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that India’s potential purchases of Su-57 fighter jets and the S-400 missile defense system is likely to be on the agenda.
Modi must walk a political tightrope, said Sumantra Bose, a comparative political science professor at India’s Krea University, signaling an ongoing commitment to Moscow without alienating the U.S. president.
“It’s a fine balancing act,” Bose said. “He has to factor Trump’s unpredictable and unstable personality into his personal calculations.”
India’s long-standing relationship with Russia became suddenly fraught in August, when Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on New Delhi as a penalty for buying Russian oil, bringing the overall rate on the country to 50 percent — one of the highest of any U.S. trading partner. Trade talks between the countries stalled. Top Trump advisers said the conflict in Ukraine was “Modi’s war” and accused India of being a “laundromat for the Kremlin.”
India bristled at the criticism and said its energy purchases would continue to be dictated by national interests. Modi, meanwhile, stepped up his outreach to other global powers. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in September, he met with both Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in what some analysts viewed as a choreographed political signal to Washington.
In the months since, temperatures have cooled. Modi said later in September that he was “fully committed” to taking the India-U.S. partnership to “new heights.” Trump told reporters in October that the prime minister was a “great man.” Trade negotiations resumed.
But Russian oil has remained an impediment. Trump told U.S. negotiators earlier this year that a trade deal with India would not be possible unless it committed to reducing its purchases. Indian officials privately told their American counterparts they would be willing to do so, but could not announce it publicly for fear of domestic backlash.
In October, the United States announced sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s state-owned oil companies, and the European Union said it would tighten its own sanctions on the country’s energy producers. Soon after, India’s largest buyer of Russian oil, the conglomerate Reliance Industries, said it would stop importing Russian crude to refine for export.
In an interview with Indian television Thursday, Putin attempted to brush off the impact of Western sanctions. “Our energy cooperation with India remains unaffected by current conditions, fleeting political swings, or indeed the tragic events in Ukraine,” he told India Today.
But Russia’s oil exports to India are expected to fall by about a third this month, from 1.8 million barrels per day in November to 1.2 million barrels per day in December, according to Janis Kluge, an economist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
“That’s already significant,” he said. “It’s a lot of money and it may create some fiscal problems for Russia.”
New Delhi has emerged as the second-largest buyer of Russian oil during the war in Ukraine, trailing only China and accounting for almost 40 percent of the country’s exports. “It is impossible for Russia to replace it,” Kluge said.
The move by Indian refiners to reduce imports comes at an especially inopportune time for Moscow, which was already facing a budget crunch. Energy revenue was down nearly 30 percent in October compared with the previous year as sanctions were stiffened and oil prices fell.
Hoping to shore up his nation’s finances — to continue the war and reassure a beleaguered Russian public — Putin must convince India to keep the crude flowing, Kluge said.
“There might be a reduction,” Kluge said, “but that also might be temporary. A lot will depend on how seriously the U.S. takes the enforcement.” After previous rounds of sanctions, he noted, there was a period of adaptation. Volumes dropped until new methods of circumvention were found.
“The financial incentives to find ways around the sanctions are so high,” Kluge said.
Already, two state-run oil refiners in India have resumed purchasing Russian oil from non-sanctioned entities, according to Indian media reports. “Our companies buy oil from wherever it is cheaper,” said an Indian official with the Foreign Ministry, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. Sanctions play a role in the decision-making, the official added, along with “dynamics in the international market.”
Russia has both acknowledged and sought to downplay the impact of American economic and political coercion, which hangs heavy over Putin’s first visit to India in about four years. Peskov said Tuesday that Moscow does not have the “slightest intention” of interfering with U.S.-India ties but understands “there is a pressure over India and this is the reason that we have to be very careful in creating an architecture of our relationship that must be free of any influence coming from third countries.”
By welcoming the Russian president, Bose said, India hopes to send a message that “‘It’s okay, we haven’t given up on you’ … and the fundamentals of the relationship remain strong.”
Central to the relationship is India’s reliance on Russian weapons. Thirty-eight percent of Russia’s arms exports between 2020 and 2024 went to India, according to a 2025 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, making it Moscow’s top customer during that period.
India’s air force chief said in August that the Russian-made S-400 missile system took down several enemy aircraft during its conflict with archrival Pakistan in the spring, a claim Islamabad denied.
India is unlikely to turn away from Russia because “there are no reliable partners around” and, under Trump, it can no longer rely on a steady bond with the U.S., said Happymon Jacob, the founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, a nonpartisan think tank in New Delhi.
“Everyone is hedging,” he said.
Belton reported from London. Robyn Dixon in Riga, Latvia, and Supriya Kumar contributed to this report.
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