by Denis Manturov Meets Jaishankar and Sitharaman; India Confirms It Will Continue Having Multiple Important Relationships
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
NEW DELHI, INDIA — Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov arrived in New Delhi for meetings with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, in a diplomatic visit that occurred within weeks of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s own visit to India, creating a diplomatic schedule that illustrates India’s practiced non-alignment with precision: both Washington and Moscow come to New Delhi, both receive substantive engagement, and India continues to do what India’s national interest requires rather than what either visitor’s preference would suggest.
The Strategic Autonomy Position
India’s engagement with Russia in 2026 continues despite Western sanctions and pressure, driven by the specific dependencies and interests that India has developed: Russian oil at discounted prices that reduce the current account pressure from global oil markets, Russian defense equipment that constitutes a large portion of India’s existing military inventory and requires Russian parts and support to maintain, and the historical relationship between India and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union) that pre-dates the current geopolitical alignment.
Jaishankar, who is among the most articulate Foreign Affairs Ministers in India’s recent history and who has become a public intellectual on questions of Indian foreign policy philosophy, has made India’s multi-alignment position explicit: India is not non-aligned in the Cold War sense of declining to choose sides, but is strategically autonomous in choosing its relationships based on national interest rather than alliance bloc membership. This is a coherent position that the United States finds frustrating, that Russia finds useful, and that India finds necessary.
The Sitharaman Meeting: Economic Dimensions
Manturov’s meeting with Finance Minister Sitharaman reflects the economic dimensions of the Russia-India relationship that the geopolitical analysis tends to subordinate: trade in rupees and rubles to avoid dollar-denominated transactions that Western sanctions complicate, Indian pharmaceutical exports to Russia, technology cooperation that benefits both sides, and the specific energy trade that represents the largest volume transaction. These are the subjects of finance ministry discussion, and their management determines the commercial relationship’s sustainability regardless of the geopolitical noise around it.
The Ministry of External Affairs‘s management of the Russia relationship alongside the US relationship requires the specific diplomatic vocabulary of a country maintaining positions that its partners find contradictory from their own perspective but that India considers internally consistent from its own. This is advanced diplomatic performance, executed with the professionalism that India’s foreign service has built across seven decades of managing exactly this kind of multi-directional engagement.
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India’s Energy Trade With Russia: The Arithmetic
India’s purchase of Russian oil at discounted prices — the specific discount that Russian crude has traded at relative to Brent since Western sanctions began — has been a commercially significant benefit to India during a period of elevated global energy prices. The savings relative to market-price oil purchases, estimated at tens of billions of dollars over the sanctions period, represent real fiscal resources that India has deployed elsewhere. This commercial benefit is the specific reason that the India-Russia energy relationship has continued despite Western diplomatic pressure: the economics are straightforwardly positive for India, and the diplomatic cost — friction with the United States and Europe — is manageable within India’s strategic autonomy framework. Manturov’s visit to discuss finance ministry matters presumably covers the trade settlement mechanisms (rupee-ruble transactions), energy delivery logistics, and the forward arrangements that sustain the commercial relationship through the ongoing geopolitical environment.
The specific items that Manturov discussed with NSA Doval are not publicly reported in detail, which is appropriate for a meeting that covered defense cooperation and national security matters. The NSA’s portfolio includes intelligence coordination, counter-terrorism cooperation, and defense procurement decisions that have both commercial and security dimensions. Russia’s role as a supplier of defense platforms — the S-400 air defense system, Su-30 fighter aircraft, T-90 tanks, and submarines — creates specific dependency relationships that require ongoing management: spare parts supply, technical support, upgrade pathways, and the coordination of indigenous production under technology transfer arrangements. These are operational matters that the Manturov-Doval conversation presumably covered alongside the higher-level strategic framing that the foreign minister-level meeting provides.
India’s management of its relationship with both the US and Russia requires the diplomatic skill of maintaining trust with both parties while being transparent about the constraints each relationship places on the other. The US knows that India buys Russian oil. India knows that the US knows. The diplomatic convention under which this is managed — each side maintaining positions that the other side formally objects to while the relationship continues — is the specific form of pragmatic diplomacy that mature bilateral relationships require when genuine differences in national interest cannot be resolved but the relationship is valuable enough to maintain regardless.
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The India-Russia defense relationship’s longevity — spanning from the Soviet era through multiple Indian governments of different ideological orientations — reflects something important about Indian strategic culture: defense relationships are not primarily ideological partnerships but supply relationships evaluated on the basis of technology, price, reliability, and the specific terms of indigenous production that reduce future dependency. Russia has provided favorable terms on all of these dimensions over decades, which is why the relationship has survived the ideological changes that have characterized India’s domestic politics across the same period.
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