Russia’s Sino-Indo Balancing Act Has An Increasingly Important Infrastructure Component

India fears that Russia might become disproportionately dependent on China and then be pressured by Beijing into curtailing its arms shipments to Delhi that the latter depends upon for ensuring its national security interests vis-à-vis China and that country’s Pakistani ally. The only realistic means of preemptively averting that scenario is for India to compete with China in serving as a complementary valve for Russia from Western economic pressure via energy purchases and infrastructure investments.

Putin considers BRI to be complementary to Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership (GEP), which refers to his vision of peacefully integrating the supercontinent through the expansion of non-Western institutions like the SCO and bilateral trade. Russia believes that it’ll be more difficult for the US to exploit divisions between countries for divide-and-rule purposes if this would be at the expense of those states’ objective interests, which his why he wants them all to enter into relations of complex mutual interdependence.

BRI advances this goal at a scale that Russia is incapable of owing to China’s much greater excess capital that it’s investing in infrastructure and other types of connectivity projects. Regarding the former Soviet space, this takes the form of the China-Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor (CCAWAEC), which overlaps with Turkiye’s Middle Corridor. Even though both can lead to the Central Asian Republics’ (CAR) diversifying trade away from Russia, they can also bring development and thus stability too.

Putin’s embrace of BRI can therefore be interpreted as tacit acknowledgement that Russia accepts the erosion of its previously dominant influence in the CARs so long as this only takes economic forms and contributes to stabilizing this geostrategic space through the tangible improvement of its people’s lives. More Chinese-led development can reduce the likelihood of locals being influenced by radical ideologies, while their governments might be less inclined to rely on the West for rebalancing their ties with Russia.

Since Russia trusts China, which is reinforced by their similarly strained relations with the West as well as their shared membership in the SCO, it doesn’t fear that China would advance its political or military interests in the CARs at Russia’s expense. Moreover, the aforesaid largely align, unlike Russia and the West’s political and military interests in that same space. That being the case, their interplay in the CARs via BRI and the GEP can be described as an example of the Sino-Russo Entente in action.

Another manifestation of this can be seen in the Arctic via what Russia describes as the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and China has previously called the “Polar Silk Road”. Some of China’s excess capital can be invested in relevant infrastructure projects there to speed up the growth of this maritime corridor between Asia and Europe, but Russia also doesn’t want China to be the dominant player here since it expects that NATO will exploit the optics of that scenario to justify its plans to militarize the Arctic.

For that reason, while China might ultimately become the most important of Russia’s foreign investment partners there, it’s unlikely to become the dominant one since Moscow envisages India gently balancing its economic influence. It’s a fellow member of BRICS and the SCO, and those three countries form the Russia-India-China (RIC) core of these multipolar institutions. Accordingly, India’s Arctic investments are welcomed by Russia and aren’t seen as threatening by China despite their increasingly intense rivalry.

India already invests in some of Russia’s Arctic energy projects and could be incentivized to scale up these investments to keep pace with China’s predictably forthcoming ones, which would preempt the scenario of the People’s Republic becoming the dominant player there and thus maintain balance between them. It should also be mentioned that India plays an important role in Russia’s GEP through their North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) across Iran, which also has an eastern branch into the CARs.

This explains why Putin referenced that megaproject in his speech at mid-October’s BRI Forum since it’s considered to be a major element of his country’s GEP that also complements BRI’s infrastructure-driven connectivity of Eurasia despite being led by China’s top Asian rival nowadays. He arguably intended to convey the notion that those two’s integration initiatives shouldn’t be seen as zero-sum but as mutually beneficial since they advance their shared multipolar goals.

This observation is the most important takeaway from Putin’s speech since it shows that Russia is multi-aligning between its RIC partners by encouraging them both to increase their investments in its infrastructure projects in spite of their increasingly tense rivalry. Although China and India are rapidly diverging on a growing range of issues, they nevertheless still have a common interest in strengthening their ties with fellow BRICS and SCO member Russia as part of their respective Eurasian policies.

India fears that Russia might become disproportionately dependent on China and then be pressured by Beijing into curtailing its arms shipments to Delhi that the latter depends upon for ensuring its national security interests vis-à-vis China and that country’s Pakistani ally. The only realistic means of preemptively averting that scenario is for India to compete with China in serving as a complementary valve for Russia from Western economic pressure via energy purchases and infrastructure investments.

This strategic imperative adds context to India’s unprecedented purchase of Russian energy since February 2022, its subsequent redoubling of efforts to revive the previously stalled NSTC, and India’s newfound interest in investing in Russia’s Arctic region. Had India succumbed to Western political pressure to condemn and sanction Russia, then the worst-case scenario of China leveraging its influence over Russia at India’s national security expense could have potentially become a fait accompli by now.   

So long as India continues complementing China’s role as Russia’s valve from Western economic pressure through the means that were described, there’s no chance that Russia will curtail arms shipments to India under Chinese pressure, which thus helps maintain military parity amidst the escalating Sino-Indo rivalry. The Kremlin is aware of these strategic imperatives that have driven Indian policy towards Russia since February 2022 and wants to benefit from them by encouraging even more Indian investments.  

That’s why Putin referenced the NSTC in his speech at mid-October’s BRI Forum, which signaled to China and India that Russia regards them as equally significant economic partners whose investments in its territory are mutually beneficial to their shared multipolar goals and should therefore be scaled up. It’s the highest-profile event at which this notion was conveyed, which marks the latest phase of Russia’s Sino-Indo balancing act that’s the direct result of its new strategic calculations since February 2022.