Fact Check: Russian-Pakistani Defense Cooperation Will Likely Remain Limited

The few extra bucks that Russia could make from any hypothetical sale of high-tech weapons systems to Pakistan wouldn’t come anywhere close to compensating for the way in which this decision could adversely impact Russia’s interests vis India.

Pakistan’s Daily Times published an article headlined “Ambassador Khorev says Russia keen to boost defence ties with Pak”, which was then republished by MSN per a syndication agreement. Many casual news consumers nowadays just skim headlines and then only click on the most interesting stories to give them a cursory review. For that reason, an indeterminate number of people might have assumed that there was a significant event to justify this headline, which wasn’t the case as will now be explained.

Those who actually read the Daily Times’ article or MSN’s republication thereof will discover that the former misleadingly chose to make a single vague point from Ambassador Albert P. Khorev’s recent article the headline of their own without even reporting exactly what he wrote. Titled “A Time-Tested Friendship” and published by The Nation, he reviewed the latest developments in bilateral relations, which ended with one sentence about the future of their defense cooperation.

In his words: “We intend to further strengthen defense cooperation between Russia and Pakistan, as evidenced by the regular contacts between the military leadership of the two countries, the Russia-Pakistan ‘Friendship-2024’ exercises and Russia’s participation in the upcoming Aman 2025 naval exercise in Karachi in February this year.” As can be seen, this is different than what casual news consumers likely assumed upon coming across the Daily Times’ and/or MSN’s headline.

The impression that they might have been left with had they not actually read those articles, let alone the primary one that the Daily Times didn’t even hyperlink to for context and convenience, is that defense cooperation might soon expand in new ways such as through big-ticket arms sales. Not only is this not the case at present, but it’s also unlikely in the near- or even medium-terms, and that’s because of Pakistan’s existing dependence on Chinese arms and Russia’s strategic partnership with India.

Regarding the first, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) annual “Trends In International Arms Transfers” report from last year determined that China provided a whopping 82% of Pakistan’s arms imports from 2019-2023. These two countries consider themselves to be “iron brothers” to this day in spite of their incipient differences over Islamabad’s poor handling of terrorist threats to Chinese nationals and the Belt & Road Initiative’s flagship China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

From their perspective, India constitutes a national security threat that’s best tackled jointly, ergo why China arms Pakistan to the teeth against it as proven by SIPRI’s report and is expected to continue doing so no matter what might happen with CPEC due to their shared enduring interests in this regard. Accordingly, hypothetically diversifying from Chinese weapons systems to Russian ones wouldn’t just risk interoperability problems, but Beijing might also see it as an unfriendly move that harms mutual trust.

Likewise, India would certainly consider any hypothetical export of high-tech Russian weapons systems to Pakistan to be a very unfriendly move that would definitely harm mutual trust, something that no one in Moscow wants to have happen due to Delhi’s pivotal role in their grand strategy. It’s beyond the scope of this analysis to elaborate on, but Russia relies on India to preemptively avert potentially disproportionate dependence on China, while India also relies on Russia vis the US in this regard too.

Nevertheless, Russia previously sold four Mi-35 assault helicopters to Pakistan in 2015 that were then delivered in 2018, which is why SIPRI’s annual report from 2023 noted that 3.6% of Pakistan’s total arms imports from 2018-2022 were supplied by Russia. That upset some in India, but Russia insisted that it only wanted to bolster Pakistan’s anti-terrorist capabilities, not to degrade India’s national security in any way. Objectively speaking, these systems weren’t a game-changer, so the concern was misplaced.

India didn’t occupy anywhere near as significant of a role in Russian grand strategy at the time like it began to three years ago after the special operation and the West’s unprecedented sanctions, and since Russia didn’t export high-tech systems to Pakistan back then, it assuredly won’t do so now. On the off chance that this ever happens, however, it could toxify ties with India and consequently boost the pro-US policymaking faction there who might then more confidently lobby for distancing India from Russia.

In that scenario, Russia would risk the same disproportionate dependence on China that it sought to preemptively avert via India while India would risk the same sort of dependence on the US that it sought to preemptively avert via Russia, thus likely leading to a return to Sino-US bi-multipolarity. That outcome would contradict their complementary grand strategic goals of jointly accelerating tri-multipolarity processes with a view towards midwifing more complex multipolarity (“multiplexity”) as explained here.

The few extra bucks that Russia could make from any hypothetical sale of high-tech weapons systems to Pakistan wouldn’t come anywhere close to compensating for the way in which this decision could adversely impact Russia’s interests and is therefore why this is extremely unlikely to happen. Even so, some in Pakistan might calculate that implying otherwise could spook India into overreacting in ways that adversely impact ties with Russia, thus possibly explaining the Daily Times’ misleading headline.

Indian policymakers won’t be influenced by a Pakistani outlet’s deliberately misleading headline and all that it’s imagined to entail, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that Pakistan and India wage psychological warfare on each other, of which the examined article is an example. Sometimes, which in this case was likely the primary motive, casual news consumers are misled by these psychological-information warfare products and that’s why it’s important to clarify everything like was just done.

To sum it all up, Russia isn’t expected to export any high-tech weapons systems to Pakistan like the Daily Times’ misleading headline might have made many assume is in the cards, but it can’t be ruled out that other sales like small arms and drones might take place to bolster its anti-terrorist capabilities. Moreover, annual joint anti-terrorist drills will continue as will participation in biannual multilateral naval drills, but these aren’t directed against India. They’re also much smaller in scale than Indo-US military cooperation.