India should reassess resilience of its air defence systems purchased from Russia

I think there was a desire on the Russian side to show that Russia is not isolated, it still has allies and friends, and this is a message that they’ve always wanted to push. India has been a very important part of that... And then the Russians want to secure long term sales for their defence industry, because they have put their defence companies into eight to 10 years of debt and forced them to invest their own money into expanding production capacity, when they can only make 2.8% profit selling to the Russian government during the war. So, they need customers after the war. Otherwise, a lot of these businesses are going to collapse and the Russians suffer an economic shock. So, the Russians are trying to lay this foundation to secure their economy and their military industrial base. On the Indian side, I think the government will have wanted to message the Americans and others, that, ‘we have these relationships’, that they’re important and that ‘we have options’ and that ‘you can’t just coerce us...But there wasn't a big public announcement about weapons and so on. I think there probably were more substantive conversations held in private but not announced. And I suspect that is because officials didn’t want to antagonize the US."