Taps Coogan – March 28th, 2023

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The following chart from Bloomberg shows the sources of India weapons imports from 2017 through 2022.

Much has been made of the fact that India remains the largest buyer of Russian weapons in the world, that they refrained from voting at the UN to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and that they continue to buy Russian energy.

However, India’s Russian arms imports have been declining for years. Indeed, Russian arms exports to India fell 47% from 2017-2021 compared to the five years prior despite a large rise in India defense spending. The drop is largely responsible for Russia losing significant market share in the global arms export business as India is by far the largest buyer of Russian weapons.

Part of the decline has been India’s increasing industrial and technological sophistication. Whereas India was once a reliable buyer of Russian submarines, the latest generation of Indian nuclear powered submarines are being designed and built domestically, putting India in an elite group of countries capable of doing so. India is also developing a domestically built fighter jet and an aircraft carrier, both items for which they once depended on Russia.

Furthermore, the increasingly tight relationship between Russia and China is unlikely to help matters. China is fast supplanting Pakistan to be India’s main geopolitical rival. Given that the Ukraine conflict has massively increased China’s leverage over Russia, India’s dependence on Russian arms is likely to become increasingly untenable.

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