India's Declining Dependence on Russian Arms
How the Ukraine war accelerated a shift India had already been quietly making for years
Imagine Russia having supplied roughly 72 percent of all Indian defence imports between 2010 and 2014, a genuinely dominant supplier relationship reflecting decades of Cold War-era and post-Soviet defence cooperation, and that share falling to just 36 percent by 2020-2024, according to SIPRI data, a genuinely dramatic diversification away from single-supplier dependence that has continued even as India maintains ongoing cooperation with Russia on specific programmes like the S-400 air defence system and BrahMos, covered elsewhere on this site.
This shift accelerated substantially following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the war has severely disrupted Russian defence production capacity and delayed critical equipment and spare parts deliveries to existing Indian customers, while Western sanctions have further constrained Russia's ability to fulfil export orders reliably, creating genuine supply chain risk that pushed India to accelerate diversification it had already been pursuing more gradually for prior years.
France and Israel have captured much of the share Russia has ceded, alongside the United States, reflecting India's deliberate strategy of diversifying defence supplier relationships across multiple partner countries rather than simply replacing one dominant supplier with another, a genuine hedge against the exact kind of single-supplier disruption risk Russia's own production and sanctions challenges have demonstrated so directly.
This diversification connects directly to India's own domestic indigenisation push covered throughout this page, reduced Russian import share doesn't only reflect increased purchases from Western suppliers, it also reflects growing domestic production, covered under the Positive Indigenisation List, BEL and defence PSU discussions elsewhere on this site, gradually reducing India's need for large-scale foreign arms imports from any single country, making import diversification and domestic self-reliance two genuinely complementary, mutually reinforcing strategies rather than separate policy tracks.