Evaluating Reports That India Asked Russia To Cut Pakistan Off From Fighter Jet Engines

These reports remain unconfirmed at the time of writing, but they aren’t unreasonable since India has every reason to want to deprive its rival of this high-quality equipment after their latest clashes in spring, though so too does Russia have its own reasons for defying this request like the reports claim.

Indian outlets like India.com and DNA India reported that their country asked Russia to cut Pakistan off from fighter jet engines. For background, Pakistan’s Chinese-produced JF-17 fighter jets have been powered by Russia’s RD-93 engine, first through Chinese-licensed ones and then via direct shipments from Russia per the terms of their 2014 defense cooperation pact according to The Diplomat. Although China’s WS-13 can power the JF-17s, Pakistan stuck with Russia’s RD-93 because it’s supposedly better.

Before proceeding, it’s important to inform the reader that these reports haven’t been confirmed by India or Russia at the time of writing, so it’s possible that they’re untrue. Nevertheless, it’s believable that India would make such a request of Russia in the aftermath of its clashes with Pakistan earlier this spring, especially since India has since defied enormous US pressure to dump Russian arms and energy. The cost of doing so was 50% tariffs on its US exports and an acceleration of Trump’s pivot to Pakistan.

The US is now trying to derail India’s rise as a Great Power for the reasons explained here, which stem in no small part from India’s principled defiance of the US’ demands vis-à-vis Russia, so it’s understandable that India might have requested that Russia cut Pakistan off from the RD-93 as a favor. At the same time, the new policymaking dynamics responsible for Russia’s neutrality during the latest Indo-Pak conflict reduce the chances that it would agree to this, which readers can learn more about here.

In brief, Russia’s pro-BRI policymaking faction envisages turbocharging China’s superpower trajectory as revenge against the US for the Ukrainian Conflict and has rapidly risen in prominence from 2023 onward, with their latest achievement being September’s Power of Siberia 2 pipeline deal. It’ll increase Russia’s economic-financial dependence on China, thus making Russia even less likely to comply with India’s reported request that would disadvantage China’s Pakistani ally in any future clashes with India.

Russian-Pakistan ties are also at an historic high that Moscow wants to take even further through the strategic resource deals that it’s negotiating with Islamabad, not to mention the possibility of reviving the Soviet-built Karachi Steel Mill and pioneering more direct overland trade corridors. Cutting Pakistan off from the RD-93 therefore wouldn’t just risk upsetting China, which is increasingly becoming Russia’s senior partner despite rhetoric to the contrary, but could ruin the aforesaid profitable business deals.

Nevertheless, India’s large-scale import of Russian oil has served as an irreplaceable valve from Western sanctions pressure these 3,5 years, and bilateral trade is still many times larger than Russian-Pakistani trade and will remain so even if all the abovementioned plans one day come to fruition. India’s import of Russian oil isn’t charity to Moscow but purely self-interested with respect to maintaining socio-economic and accordingly political stability at home in order to keep India’s rise as a Great Power on track.

For these reasons, India isn’t expected to curtail its Russian oil imports unless the US grants it a waiver for purchasing sanctioned Iranian and/or Venezuelan oil to replace this, which Trump might not do. Russia might be aware of these policymaking dynamics and could have concluded, presumably with lots of input from the pro-BRI faction, that there wouldn’t be any tangible consequences for defying India’s reported request. Whether that would be the case might soon be put to the test if the reports are true.