That is not fence-sitting. That is foreign policy.

I have watched India grow and navigate through the years, and for a long time our foreign policy felt like we were a country permanently apologising for existing. Non-alignment during the Cold War looked principled from the outside and felt like paralysis from the inside. We refused to pick sides so consistently that we ended up with limited leverage on either. We were everyone’s moral voice and nobody’s real partner.

There was a period where it genuinely felt like, as someone once observed, that the Indian government was so penetrated by both the CIA and KGB that both superpowers were running India for their own interests without letting anyone notice too obviously. Whether or not that is entirely true, it captured something real about the era. India was a country whose foreign policy was shaped more by what others wanted from it than by what it wanted for itself.

That India is gone. The clearest proof of which is this: India is currently buying Russian oil at scale, sitting in the Quad with the USA, Australia and Japan, receiving tariff threats from Washington, and the Ministry of External Affairs is responding how? Calmly. Energy policy will be decided by availability and pricing considerations. Full stop. No apology. No panic. Just: we will do what works for our people.

I find this genuinely thrilling. Not because I do not understand the complexity. Because I do, and India is navigating it anyway, without flinching, without collapsing, without pretending the contradiction does not exist.

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The Numbers Nobody Wanted to Talk About

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian crude oil accounted for under 1% of India’s total oil imports. Three years later, that number had risen to somewhere between 36 and 40%. India went from barely touching Russian oil to becoming one of the largest buyers of it on the planet, in the middle of an active war, under the full gaze of its Western partners, while simultaneously deepening its relationship with the United States across defence, technology, and trade.

India imports nearly 87% of its crude oil and is the world’s third-largest oil consumer. The moment Western sanctions sent Russian crude into the market at a steep discount, India made a straightforward calculation: cheaper oil for 1.4 billion people who need affordable energy to sustain economic growth is not a geopolitical statement. It is a governing responsibility. The discourse in Western capitals framed it as moral failure. In Delhi, it was infrastructure arithmetic.

Then India did something that made Western policy circles genuinely uncomfortable. It refined that Russian crude and sold petroleum products back to Europe. At a profit. Europe, which had formally sanctioned Russian oil, was buying Indian refined products made from Russian crude because it needed the energy and there was no other viable source at the price point it required. Nobody wanted to say this out loud. India just kept doing it.

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This Is Not Fence-Sitting. This Is Architecture.

There is a version of this story where India looks merely opportunistic, buying cheap oil, saying the right things to the right people, hoping nobody notices the contradiction. That reading misses the architecture underneath it entirely.

India is in the Quad, the security framework explicitly designed as a counterweight to Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. That is a strategic alignment of the clearest kind. India is also one of Russia’s oldest and most trusted partners, a relationship that predates most current geopolitical frameworks, runs through decades of defence procurement, and carries a weight of historical trust that cannot simply be unwound by a few uncomfortable years in the global press.

What India is doing is something very few countries have the weight to pull off: refusing to let any single relationship define its entire foreign policy. The US wants India as a counterbalance to China, and India genuinely shares that concern, because China is India’s actual neighbour, its actual security challenge, and now also, ironically, its largest trading partner. Russia wants India as proof that the Western sanctions coalition has real limits. India is providing exactly that proof, while deepening trade with the very countries running those sanctions. Every party is getting something from India. And India is extracting value from every party simultaneously.

This is what strategic autonomy looks like when it actually works, not as a moral position but as genuine leverage. India is not non-aligned in the Cold War sense of the word, which was neutrality by default and often paralysis by another name. India is multiply aligned, on its own terms, with the ability to disappoint any single partner without being destroyed by that disappointment. That is a fundamentally different posture. That is optionality by design.

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The Real Web Underneath the Diplomatic Language

The standard way of describing these relationships, allies and enemies, friends and rivals, completely misses how it actually works. Every major power is using every other major power for a specific purpose, often while being in direct opposition to them on something else. The map below is my attempt to show what is actually going on underneath the diplomatic language.

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How India Handled Washington’s Pressure Without Flinching

The United States threatened punitive duties of up to 500% on Indian exports if New Delhi continued purchasing Russian oil, a sharp escalation in using trade policy as a geopolitical weapon. In October 2025, the US imposed a 25% duty on India’s Russian oil purchases on top of existing reciprocal tariffs. Sanctions on Russian companies Rosneft and Lukoil, which together comprised around 60% of India’s Russian imports, followed shortly after.

India’s response was a masterclass in calibrated compliance. Russian oil imports dropped to their lowest level in 38 months in December 2025. US oil imports increased by 31% year on year. The message to Washington looked like partial compliance. Then came the trade deal. Trump declared India had committed to stop Russian purchases. The Kremlin said Russia had heard no statements from Delhi on this matter. India’s Foreign Secretary said energy policy would continue to be determined by availability and pricing considerations.

India had bought itself a trade deal, reduced Russian oil exposure under extreme economic pressure, and still refused to formally commit to anything. Because the moment you formally commit, you lose the leverage. Both relationships survived. India paid a real price in reduced Russian oil access, but bought something more durable: a reputation for being unpressurable on the core principle, even while being tactically flexible on the margins.

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Europe’s Hypocrisy, Said Out Loud

This part should be said out loud more often. The EU was among the loudest voices pressuring India to stop buying Russian oil. The moral framing was consistent: purchasing Russian crude sustains the war machine, makes you complicit. India’s position, that its energy security obligations to 1.4 billion people took precedence over geopolitical solidarity with a conflict it had not chosen, was met with politely disguised contempt in European capitals.

Meanwhile, the EU spent 4.5 billion euros on Russian LNG in just the first half of 2025, a 7% increase year on year from the same period in 2024. Full-year 2025, the EU spent 7.2 billion euros on Russian Yamal LNG alone, generating direct revenue for Moscow while the war continued. France was the single largest buyer. Belgium doubled its imports. Europe was buying Russian gas while telling India to stop buying Russian oil, and at the same time buying Indian petroleum products refined from the Russian crude it had officially refused to purchase directly.

India noticed. It did not make a scene. But the Indian position absorbed this reality and factored it into its calculation. If even the most principled sanctions coalition is buying Russian LNG at record volumes while pressuring India over Russian crude, the moral argument is not as clean as its proponents claim. India’s response was not to match the hypocrisy but to simply refuse to be shamed by it.

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A Relationship Older Than Any Current Alliance

There is a tendency in Western analysis to treat India’s relationship with Russia as an awkward holdover, something left over from the Cold War that India is slowly being weaned off as it integrates into the Western-led order. That framing fundamentally misreads the texture of the relationship and why it is not going anywhere quickly.

India’s defence procurement has historically run through Russia to an extent that cannot be unwound in years or even decades. Soviet-era and Russian military hardware forms the backbone of significant portions of India’s armed forces: MiG and Sukhoi aircraft, BrahMos missiles built in partnership, the S-400 air defence systems that performed so decisively during Operation Sindoor. This is not a diplomatic preference. It is a hardware dependency with direct implications for India’s actual military readiness. You cannot sanction your way out of that reality in a short timeframe without actively degrading your own defence capability. Washington understands this too, even if it finds it inconvenient to acknowledge publicly.

Beyond hardware, there is simply the history. During the 1971 war, when the US Seventh Fleet and the British carrier HMS Eagle moved toward the Bay of Bengal to pressure India, it was a Soviet treaty and the presence of Soviet nuclear submarines in the Indian Ocean that gave India the diplomatic and strategic cover it needed to see the operation through. These things are not forgotten in New Delhi. They are not the primary driver of current policy, India is far too pragmatic for historical sentiment to override present interest, but they are part of the texture of the relationship at a level that sits below the formal talking points.

Russia has been, consistently, more willing to partner with India without attaching conditions about India’s other relationships. In a world where the US uses trade policy as pressure and Europe uses moral framing as pressure, Russia simply did deals. That has a value India is not willing to walk away from, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes Western capitals.

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For the First Time in My Lifetime, India Knows What It Is Worth

Growing up in India, there was always a quality of deference in the foreign policy posture that was quietly embarrassing if you paid attention to it. The sense that India had to soften its edges, qualify its positions, be careful not to offend the big powers. Non-alignment was the formal doctrine, but it often felt less like principled independence and more like a country unsure whether its opinion was welcome at the table at all.

What has changed is not the ideology. It is the confidence, and the confidence comes from a changing economic reality. The International Energy Agency projects that India will lead global oil demand growth over the next decade and account for nearly half of the incremental global increase in consumption. That kind of number changes how you sit at a table and what you feel entitled to say. You can only walk a tightrope if both sides want you on it. India has built a position where Washington and Moscow have both calculated that keeping India as a partial partner is better than losing it entirely. That calculation gives India room to manoeuvre that it simply has not had before.

The Quad is not a pledge of allegiance to Washington. The Russian oil purchases are not loyalty to Moscow. Both are tools. And India is finally using them as tools rather than as identities. That distinction is everything.