An All-Weather Alliance

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, and his co-chairing of the 27th India-Russia Inter-Governmental Commission with First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, is far more than diplomatic routine. It is a reaffirmation of a partnership that has weathered seven decades of shifting global alignments, and it arrives at a moment when the world order itself is being rewritten. Russia has been India's all-weather friend since independence, a description too often reduced to cliché but one that is borne out by hard fact. There was a time when the Indian armed forces ran almost entirely on Soviet and Russian equipment - from MiG and Sukhoi aircraft to T-72 and T-90 tanks, from Kalashnikov-pattern assault rifles to sophisticated radar systems and missile technology. Decades on, with India diversifying its procurement across the USA, France and Israel, that foundation has not crumbled. And through every phase of that evolution, the underlying trust between the two capitals has remained intact.

Nowhere was this more visible than in India's decision to acquire the S-400 Triumf air defence system despite the threat of American sanctions under CAATSA. New Delhi remained steadfast, recognising that the safeguarding of Indian airspace could not be compromised for geopolitical convenience. That single decision spoke louder than any communiqué about where India's strategic autonomy truly lies. Energy has told a similar story. Until recently, India had become the largest importer of Russian crude, a relationship that helped cushion Indian consumers from global price shocks even as Western tariff pressures, particularly from Washington, began to bite into these flows. Much of this trade was, notably, conducted in Indian rupees, with special discounts extended by Moscow - a practical arrangement that served both nations' interests while nudging the world, however modestly, away from total dependence on the dollar.

That question of dollar dependence has now acquired fresh urgency. The Iran-United States confrontation has scrambled global energy and fertiliser supply chains in ways few anticipated. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a vast share of the world's oil transits, has faced closures and disruptions; shipping lines now contend with punitive entry tariffs and the growing menace of attacks on cargo vessels. For a nation of one hundred and fifty crore people, India cannot afford to treat these disruptions as background noise. Every barrel of crude, every tonne of fertiliser, is a matter of economic and food security for a population that dwarfs entire continents. It is precisely in this scenario that Russia has once again stepped forward, offering India assured supplies of petrol, diesel, LPG and fertiliser at a time when other channels have grown unreliable. This is not sentimentality; it is strategic reliability tested under pressure, which is worth far more than fair-weather partnership.

Trade between the two nations has quadrupled in five years, from roughly USD 13 billion to nearly USD 60 billion, with both sides eyeing USD 100 billion by 2030. Yet the widening trade imbalance, now exceeding USD 50 billion, remains a genuine concern for New Delhi and must be addressed through better market access and stronger business-to-business engagement, not merely through summit rhetoric. Nuclear energy is another area of interest for India from Russia.

The broader canvas here is BRICS. As a grouping, it has steadily matured into a credible counterweight to the unipolar dominance of the dollar in global trade and finance. With India hosting the BRICS Leaders' Summit in New Delhi on September 12-13, and Putin expected to attend, the stakes could scarcely be higher. Jaishankar's Moscow visit, and the ground he has covered with Putin and Lavrov, we must interpret Jaishankar's Moscow visit and his discussions with Putin and Lavrov as significant preparatory diplomacy.

As the coming weeks unfold, quiet back-channel diplomacy and one-to-one engagements will matter as much as headline announcements. Putin's assurances to Jaishankar on continued energy and fertiliser supplies, delivered personally and reported without ambiguity, carry weight precisely because they come from a partner that has rarely wavered. India and Russia remain, in the truest sense, natural allies - and in an increasingly fractured world order, that natural alliance may prove to be one of India's most dependable strategic assets.