Analysis: Why India Can Buy Russian Oil And Still Be Friends With The US

According to analysts, India has just given the West a masterclass in international diplomacy.

With India vital to US efforts to counter the rise of China – seen by the US as a potentially greater threat to world peace than Russia – the West had to bite its tongue.

Or as Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College London, put it, the United States realized it had to treat India as a “new partner to be provoked.”

Why is India vital to the US?

Part of Washington’s plan to counter this is to include India — alongside the US, Japan and Australia — in the increasingly active security group known as the Quad, said Pant, who also heads the Strategic Studies. Program at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

Meanwhile, India has its own concerns with China. The two countries are mired in a military standoff along their shared Himalayan border that has claimed dozens of lives in recent years. And, ironically, Washington will not have been lost, but India relies heavily on Russian weapons to equip its army – including in the Himalayas.

Shared concern over Chinese aggression was made clear after the Biden-Modi meeting, when US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that China “wanted to reform the region and the international system” and said the US and India had “identified new opportunities to the operational range of our armies.”

It was a sign that — regardless of their differences over Ukraine — the two countries had a deep “understanding of each other’s points of view,” said Manoj Kewalramani, a China studies fellow at India’s Takshashila Institute.

Vocal about China, silent about India

These concerns help explain why Washington continues to criticize China’s silence on Russia’s actions in Ukraine, even as it goes silent on India’s.

On the surface, India and China seem to have similar views on the war in Ukraine. Both have positioned themselves as neutral spectators – rather than vocal opponents – both have called for peace and both have refused to condemn the invasion outright.

And both have strategic relationships with Russia that they don’t want to jeopardize.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin stated in February that their relationship knew “no boundaries”, while by some estimates India gets more than 50% of its military equipment from Russia.

But these similarities are only superficial. According to Kewalramani, there are even “big differences”.

India, on the other hand, is not critical of NATO and seems eager to downplay its differences with the US. There have also been subtle shifts in India’s position as the war progressed.

Modi had spoken to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, while Chinese leaders had not spoken, said Li Mingjiang, an associate professor of international relations at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. India was also stricter in its criticism of alleged Russian war crimes, Li said.

This month, India’s ambassador to the United Nations called the killings of civilians in Bucha “deeply disturbing,” she condemned and called for an open investigation.

Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun, on the other hand, said the deaths were “deeply disturbing” but stopped attributing blame and urged “all parties” to “avoid baseless accusations”.

Significantly, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted India’s condemnation of “the killing of civilians in Ukraine” and its “humanitarian aid to the people of Ukraine” following the Biden-Modi talks.

A complicated relationship

The US may also recognize that India’s relationship with Russia has historically followed a very different course from that of the West. Blinken noted that India’s ties to Russia had developed over decades, at a time when the United States could not be a partner of India.

That seemed to be a reference to the Cold War between the US and USSR – in which India was officially non-aligned. However, India started leaning towards the USSR in the 1970s when the US started providing military and financial aid to its neighbor Pakistan.

This was when Russia started supplying weapons to India, and to this day India relies heavily on Russia for military equipment.

In 2018, India signed a $5 billion arms deal with Russia for an air defense missile system, despite the deal that may put it in the crosshairs of Washington’s Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, a federal law passed in 2017 that imposed new sanctions on Iran, Russia and North Korea.

India’s reliance on Russian weapons limits its ability to expose Moscow’s actions in Ukraine. When Putin visited Delhi last December, Modi even called Putin a “best friend.”

‘Provoked from all sides’

All this has led to a position where India is “pursued by all parties,” Pant said.

Moscow remains onside and remains eager to sell India discounted oil. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov even met his counterpart in Delhi this month and praised India for not looking “one-sided” at the war in Ukraine.

And beyond that is the West, with which ties have grown ever closer since Modi’s election in 2014. The annual trade between India and the US is more than $110 billion compared to India’s trade with Russia which is about $8 billion. In recent years, India has also become a major customer for US military equipment.

Still, there was a hint of unease during Biden’s meeting with Modi. The US president urged his Indian counterpart not to increase the use of Russian oil in his country, but offered to help him buy oil from elsewhere. India, which imports 80% of its oil needs, gets no more than 3% from Russia.

So it seems that India has managed to strike an impressive balancing act.

“India is actually coming out of this crisis very strong,” Pant said. “And that’s actually quite an achievement.”