India's defence relationship with Russia, and before it the Soviet Union, spans seven decades and encompasses the majority of India's military platforms. From MiG fighters to T-72 and T-90 tanks, Kilo-class submarines, aircraft carriers, surface-to-air missile systems, and BrahMos missiles, Russian technology has been the backbone of Indian military capability. The Ukraine conflict has brutally exposed the risks of this dependency, and the Bharat Defence Tech Show has engaged with this strategic dilemma with characteristic directness.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent international sanctions have created supply chain disruptions that have directly affected India's defence maintenance programmes. Spare parts for T-90 tanks, MiG-29 fighters, and Su-30MKI — all critical Indian platforms — have become harder to source as Russian defence production is diverted to the war effort. BDTS discussions have candidly examined the extent of these disruptions and the emergency measures India has taken to sustain its Russian-origin systems, including reverse engineering of critical components and emergency procurement from third countries.
India's defence diversification has been a long-standing strategic objective that has accelerated dramatically since 2022. The US, France, Israel, and now South Korea are all deepening defence relationships with India, partly as India seeks alternatives to Russian systems. BDTS has been an important platform for establishing these new relationships, with delegations from Western and allied countries using the summit as a venue to present their capability offers to Indian procurement officials.
The BrahMos relationship — a genuine joint venture rather than simply a Russian sale — offers a model for how India can maintain productive defence technology relationships with Russia in domains where genuine value is created, while reducing strategic dependency on platforms where Russia's reliability has been compromised by geopolitical events.
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