India has traditionally been a major defence export market for Russia, with the relationship stretching back to Soviet times. While being mostly a vendor - customer relationship between 1960 and 2000, it has now started to evolve in the 'beyond-visual range' era of multi-domain warfare.

As such, nowadays, the relationship has started to take form as a true partnership between two military industrial complexes. On the surface it now appears that India is exporting its own defence systems to countries traditionally identified as customers whose markets were once part of a Russian monopoly.

However, some of the hardware India is supplying to these markets is reliant on significant Russian cooperation and input, which technically maintains Moscow’s influence albeit in a different form. The clearest example of this is the Brahmos cruise missile which has been exported to the Philippines with a deal for three batteries of the system for $375mn sealed in 2022, and deliveries beginning in 2024.

However the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for the missiles, Brahmos Aerospace Private Limited, is a joint venture between India's state owned Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Russia's state owned NPO Mashinostroyenia (NPOM).

Furthermore, while India has been pushing for local manufacturing of as many of the components and subsystems of the missile as possible, key intellectual property for the missile and several imported subsystems is still based on NPOM’s original Soviet design of the P-800 Oniks from the 1980s.

This dependency ensures that while the Indian side has made strides in improving the original design, Moscow will continue to have a say and a share in the profits whenever the system is procured worldwide by any entity.

According to a report by the Times of India, New Delhi is on the path to conclude agreements with Vietnam and Indonesia for supply of the Brahmos batteries. However a formal No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the Russian side is awaited before these deals can be finalised.

India’s defence export push has been motivated by two main factors. The first is the desire to sustain the funding required for the development and manufacture of indigenous defence systems. The second is to compete with China, which is emerging as an even bigger competitor to Moscow in its traditional arms export markets and which remains New Delhi’s own biggest strategic rival and national security challenge.

As a highly technical and capital-intensive sector, military manufacturing can only be sustained in the long run by order books promising large and consistent cash flows with high returns on investment, thereby justifying the equally high expenses.

India’s own military has been unable to order a large enough number of units for systems and platforms that its state owned and private sector defence companies have developed for it. In many cases this has led to Indian entities spending large sums on developing intellectual property (IP) in the hopes that the Indian armed forces will order enough units for the upfront costs to be covered as well as for the economies of scale to kick in.

That said, in practice, constrained by their own recurring operating costs, such as remunerations, pensions and benefits for dependents, the Indian Ministry of Defence and the military under it has been unable to allocate sums large enough for indigenous equipment to be produced in one go.

Instead the funding for these acquisitions has trickled down with marginal increases by global standards, thus making it untenable for IP owners to set up production lines. This asymmetry in supply and demand has led to Indian companies looking for orders in foreign markets.

However, neither New Delhi nor Moscow, sees the debut of Indian weapons in the same price sensitive segment of the Global South as a zero sum game, and both are much more likely to cooperate than compete. The saga of India and Russia’s cooperation in co-development of defence technologies can be tracked back to India’s feedback and improvisations on the platforms supplied by Russia off the shelf.

India’s SU-30 multirole fighter aircraft fleet, which through several iterations has evolved into what is now the SU-30MKI variant with over 250 jets in service with the Indian Air Force. Building upon the base SU-27, the SU-30 lacked the thrust vectoring, radar and other electronic optimisations that were required by the Indian Air Force.

Through a complex negotiating process of licensed manufacturing, India’s state owned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) managed to secure the rights to build SU-30MKI and has integrated all Indian specific capability enhancements ever since, delivering over 220 aircraft over its currently ongoing production run.

A version of these India-specific enhancements later also made their way into Russia’s own upgraded versions of the SU-30 designated the SU-30SM, with the cooperation on the base platform becoming mutually beneficial. Similarly India has also supplied an old Russian origin diesel electric submarine of the Kilo class to Myanmar’s navy as a training platform.

Although the transfer of the boat was pro-bono from India’s side it opened up a significant opportunity for Russia as the OEM of the boat to supply Myanmar with additional services for the vessel and training. Armenia however represents an outlier from this trend, as Yerevan has increasingly grown distrustful of Moscow following the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Yerevan sees Moscow as failing to deter or intervene to stop Azerbaijan from capturing territory, as well as the ethnic cleansing of Armenians that followed.

New Delhi happened to have the appropriate set of defence platforms on offer that fit Armenia’s needs in the form of small arms, the Akash air defence system, and the Pinaka Multiple Barrel Rocket Launchers (MBRL) that were relatively competitively priced.

In aggregate these exports to Armenia are estimated to be worth around $1bn in valuation and are only likely to expand as the years go by, at least in the case of Yerevan.

Despite their performance and demonstrated fast deliveries of the first batch to Armenia, India has not been able to find a buyer for both the Akash air defence system and Pinaka MBRL since 2022, dousing much of the optimism that the deal initially brought in.

India also has hopes to not only arrest the fall in numbers in its air force’s squadron strength with its indigenously developed Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) HAL Tejas, but to make it an attractive export platform for the Global South. However, the programme has been stymied by a reliable supply of engines by General Electric (NYSE:GE) for the aircraft, delaying production for the units already on order by India’s own air force.

Earlier in the design stage of the HAL Tejas, India rejected Russian engines citing performance issues and instead opted for its Western analogue in the form of the General Electric GE-404. However, Pakistan and China instead picked a Russia origin engine, the Klimov RD-93 for their co-developed JF-17 fighter jet, which directly competes with Tejas as a similarly competitively priced light weight fighter aircraft.

Pakistan and China have also successfully concluded deals and delivered the JF-17 to Nigeria, Myanmar and Azerbaijan, with a deal with Iraq also being negotiated. While India has tried to build its own engine for the Tejas in the form of the Kaveri project, insufficient funding has stalled it.

However India hopes to revive the project with the help of a French firm - Safran (EPA:SAF). If India is able to successfully develop and manufacture the Kaveri or a derivative more advanced aero engine it may be in a position to compete with Russia, and the China-Pakistan duo, as well as Sweden with its Gripen multi role fighter to equip more price sensitive Global South countries.

However, given that both India and Sweden depend on the same source for the engines, in the form of General Electric in the US, the competition to acquire components is likely to end in favour of Sweden as the country has since become a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) member state and is more closely aligned to the US in national security and defence industrial matters.

This represents an opportunity for India though as New Delhi can similarly alter the design and mull a variant of the LCA Tejas although admittedly at great cost which sources engines from Russia to effectively compete as well as cooperate with Moscow in the same segment - just as China and Pakistan do with their JF-17.

As such, despite its own development of several air defence systems India is also not competing with Moscow in the long range air defence subsector with New Delhi’s own forces procuring the Russian origin Almaz-Antey S-400 instead of using a similar indigenously designed DRDO system called Kusha.

While Kusha may end up being procured in smaller numbers and being integrated into India’s envisioned multi layered air defence grid called Project Sudarshan Chakra, its prospects of beating the S-400 or its successor the S-500 are unclear at this stage.

It is also unlikely that Almaz-Antey will find common cause in helping India develop a niche air defence system. However, some Indian companies like Reliance Defence have tied up with Almaz-Anty for overhaul and upgrade of short range Tor air defence and point defence systems in service with Indian forces.

The continuation of these partnerships for the overhaul and upgrade of similar inventories around the world in the Global South may be possible if the costs and revenues make sense for both Reliance and Almaz-Anty.