MOSCOW: The time-tested partners India and Russia moved towards more balanced, diversified economic ties in 2025, as both sides realised the need to expand bilateral trade beyond defence and energy sectors.

During Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to New Delhi in December, India and Russia unveiled a raft of measures, including a five-year roadmap to build a robust economic partnership and addressed India's concerns over trade deficit.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also conveyed to President Putin that the war in Ukraine must be brought to an end through peaceful means.

Prior to his visit to India, when asked about the US threat to impose high tariffs and sanctions on Russia's key partners, Putin stated that the Indian people would not tolerate their country being bullied into making a decision that contradicted their national interests and priorities, as reported by the RT news channel.

“(India) will never allow itself to be humiliated by anyone. I know Prime Minister Modi, he will also not make any such decisions,” he had said.

He was referring to the additional 25 per cent tariff imposed by President Donald Trump on New Delhi as a penalty for its purchases of Russian oil, taking the total levies imposed on India by the US to 50 per cent.

New Delhi has described these duties as “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable.”

Meanwhile, the key outcome of the 23rd India-Russia Annual Summit held in New Delhi was the signing and approval of 30 documents that form a long-term foundation for expanding trade, economic, and investment cooperation, including on non-nuclear (powered) shipbuilding, and the training of Indian sailors for polar shipping.

“We are witnessing a shift from a general exchange of interests to the substantive development of specific cooperation formats—from joint R&D and technology transfer to the creation of production capacities and the development of long-term cooperation chains,” Russia's trade representative in India, Andrey Sobolev, told TASS.

Sobolev said that both countries are showing mutual interest in establishing joint ventures and localising their production in their respective territories.

Russian companies view India as a promising platform for localising production, targeting both the domestic market and expanding into South Asian and third-country markets, while Indian businesses are increasingly exploring opportunities in the Russian market, he added.

Meanwhile, many observers tend to believe the potential of Indo-Russian bilateral cooperation is almost exhausted, and the problematic supplies of Russian discounted crude are likely to dry up under pressure from Western sanctions.

Both sides believe in the need for expanding bilateral trade beyond the massive crude supplies at a discounted price.

"India, being and remaining a sovereign nation, carries out foreign trade operations and purchases energy resources where it is beneficial for itself," the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared in an after-summit briefing.

Although India has invested in many Russian oil and gas projects, including the Sakhalin island, Siberia, to source hydrocarbon energy resources, businesses in both countries are also considering establishing a joint-investment fund to look beyond oil and gas to balance the bilateral trade, the President of Moscow-based Indian Business Alliance (IBA), Sammy Manoj Kotwani, had said.

Earlier in September, Putin and Modi had an hour-long conversation before joining their teams for bilateral talks on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Tianjin, China.

Putin offered Modi a ride in his Russian-made Aurus limousine, where they interacted for almost an hour, an incident that grabbed the world's attention.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s visit to Russia in August to co-chair the 26th Session of the India-Russia Inter-Governmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Cooperation (IRIGC-TEC) had set the stage for the summit.

During the visit, Jaishankar called on President Putin and held meetings with Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov.

Russian co-chair of IRIGC, Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov, told Rossiya-24 TV channel that economic interaction is not limited to trade, but also to creating hi-tech infrastructure and logistics for companies involved in the full cycle of extraction of resources to manufacturing finished products to help them in marketing in each other's domain and export to third countries.

The Roscosmos space agency is engaged with ISRO in the joint production of rocket engines, Russian media reported.

Interfax reported earlier this month about advanced stages in negotiations on the supply of powerful RD-192 liquid fuel rocket engines with the aim of localisation and license production in India.

The RD-192 produced by Energomash enterprise with heavy lift capability is likely to be used by ISRO in its Gaganyan project of human space flight.

The absence of announcement of any big-ticket defence, space or energy deals during the New Delhi summit did raise some speculations.

According to diplomatic sources and experts speaking to PTI on the conditions of anonymity, they hardly recall the signing of Indo-Russian defence deals during the summits.

In one of his past press interviews, DPM Denis Manturov had said that Russia has some of the most advanced technology, but for the limited market of 140 million (Russian population), building a whole plant is financially viable, but synergy with India, with a huge market, will be a win-win case.

Another Russian vice premier, Alexei Overchuk, talked about fast-tracking talks about India’s FTA with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) of five former Soviet republics.

The EAEU includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia and has a collective GDP (PPP) of about USD 8.5 trillion.

Overchuk announced this in an interview with the Rossiya-24 television channel.

On December 21, at the EAEU summit in St Petersburg, President Putin announced that New Delhi had expressed its readiness to intensify work on the agreement with the union.

The trade turnover between Russia and India continued to grow this year, exceeding USD 70 billion.

"It is crucial that this growth is accompanied by a gradual change in the structure of trade to achieve the target of USD100 billion by 2030,” the Russian Trade official stated.