Vladimir Putin has spent much of the past decade insisting that Ukraine has no independent claim to nationhood, that it is, in his formulation, an artificial construct carved out of “historical Russia.”

It is worth remembering that this is not a new argument.

It is Stalin’s argument, updated for a different century and pursued by different means.

What connects the two men is not merely that both ruled from the Kremlin and both fought wars touching Ukraine.

It is a shared premise: that Ukraine’s value lies in what it can be extracted from and denied to others, not in what its people might choose for themselves.

Stalin treated Ukraine as an internal resource to be broken and harvested. Putin is treating it as an external prize to be conquered and absorbed.

The logic is continuous. The method has changed completely.

Stalin’s Ukraine: Extraction Through Terror

Stalin’s relationship with Ukraine was never about governance in any normal sense. It was about output — grain, coal, industrial labor, political conformity — and about ensuring that Ukraine could never generate the kind of national cohesion that would let it act as a rival center of gravity within the Soviet system. Three instruments did the work.

The first was forced collectivization, launched at the end of the 1920s, which stripped Ukrainian peasants of land, livestock, and any autonomous claim on what they produced. The second was the deliberate weaponization of that collectivized system during 1932–33, when Moscow set grain procurement quotas for Ukraine that were impossible to meet without starving the countryside and enforced them anyway, sealing republic borders to stop peasants from fleeing in search of food. The result, the Holodomor, killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians. This was not incidental famine. It was famine as an instrument of political discipline, aimed specifically at breaking Ukrainian rural society and any residual attachment to national or cultural distinctiveness.

The third instrument was the parallel assault on Ukrainian elites and identity, the purges of Ukrainian communists, writers, and clergy in the 1930s (what Ukrainian historiography calls the Executed Renaissance), the suppression of Ukrainian-language institutions, and the subsequent promotion of Russification as state policy. Stalin’s Ukraine was a place whose resources, agricultural and industrial, were to be fed into Soviet strength, and whose people were a security problem to be managed through terror, deportation, and demographic engineering. The war years compounded this: millions of Ukrainians died under both German occupation and Soviet reconquest, and the postwar Soviet state resumed the same pattern of extraction and suppression, including a second, smaller famine in 1946–47.

The throughline in Stalin’s approach to Ukraine specifically is this: its sovereignty was never acknowledged even nominally as something requiring separate treatment from Moscow’s interests. Ukraine existed to be used. Its people existed to be managed. This was internal colonization conducted inside the architecture of a single state, which made it invisible to most of the outside world for decades, famine and terror do not produce satellite imagery or wire service bulletins the way tanks crossing a border do.

Spain: Stalin’s Other Playbook, and Its Echo in Ukraine’s Coalitions

Stalin’s instinct to use a conflict abroad as an extension of domestic control did not stay confined to Ukraine. It surfaced again, barely three years after the worst of the Holodomor, in Spain — and the coalition structures that formed around that war offer a second, complementary way of reading what’s continuous and what’s changed between Stalin’s era and Putin’s.

When Francisco Franco’s military uprising began in July 1936, Spain became, in effect, a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. Hitler’s Germany sent the Condor Legion, giving German pilots combat experience and a live testbed for new aircraft and bombing tactics; the April 1937 bombing of Guernica became the era’s signature demonstration of a fascist power’s willingness to terror-bomb civilians. Mussolini’s Italy went further still, committing roughly 50,000 troops and substantial equipment, treating Spain as an opening to challenge French and British influence in the Mediterranean while advancing fascist ideology. Against them, Stalin’s Soviet Union became the Spanish Republic’s primary international backer — advisers, pilots, tanks, aircraft but that support came, as it always did with Stalin, with political strings attached. Moscow used its position inside the Republican coalition to purge Spanish communists and anarchists who didn’t fit Stalin’s line, extending his domestic terror campaigns into an international arena. Meanwhile Britain and France hid behind the Non-Intervention Committee, a diplomatic fiction that constrained aid to the Republic while doing nothing to stop fascist intervention on the other side.

The pattern is instructive for what it shares with Ukraine and what it doesn’t. Both conflicts turned local disputes into global proxy contests that tested the resolve and capability of the major powers. Both attracted foreign volunteers in the name of an ideological cause, the International Brigades drew some 35,000 volunteers from more than fifty countries, including George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, who chronicled the war for global audiences; Ukraine has drawn its own international volunteers and, per open-source reporting, has become a training ground in small-drone warfare whose skills are already diffusing to conflicts and criminal networks far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Both, too, exposed the weakness of the era’s international institutions, the League of Nations’ paralysis over Spain anticipates the UN Security Council’s paralysis over Ukraine, Russia’s veto playing the role the Non-Intervention Committee played in the 1930s.

But the coalitions themselves diverge sharply. The 1930s alignment was ideologically clean, fascist powers against the Soviet-backed Republic, with clear doctrinal stakes that inspired tens of thousands to physically travel and fight. Ukraine’s supporting coalition, by contrast, is institutionally dense (NATO, the EU, the G7, a Coalition of the Willing) and geographically broad (Japan, South Korea, and Australia have all contributed meaningfully), but Russia’s coalition is transactional rather than ideological, Chinese economic oxygen, Iranian drones, North Korean shells and troops, bound together by shared antagonism toward Western primacy rather than a common doctrine. And where the 1930s required physical presence, pilots had to fly the planes, advisers had to stand next to the guns, today’s high-tech proxy war lets outside powers provide real-time satellite intelligence, precision-guided systems, and even deep-strike targeting data without committing personnel at all, all while nations sustain the diplomatic fiction of non-belligerent status. Economic warfare has changed just as completely: Spain’s 1930s economies could sever trade ties without catastrophic consequence, while Ukraine’s war unfolds inside a genuinely interdependent global economy, where SWIFT exclusion, frozen central bank assets, and Russia’s own weaponization of energy exports create leverage and vulnerability that simply didn’t exist a century ago.

What Spain and Ukraine share, in other words, is Stalin’s underlying instinct — use an external conflict to extend and enforce a domestic political logic — filtered through radically different technological and institutional eras. In Spain, that instinct meant liquidating ideological rivals inside a coalition he nominally supported. In Ukraine today, the nearest Russian equivalent is Putin’s insistence, echoed at home through total state media control, that the war is a defensive necessity against Western aggression rather than a war of choice, domestic narrative discipline substituting for the purges Stalin once ran through the Comintern apparatus abroad.

The Buffer State That Wouldn’t Stay Buffered

I did not come to this comparison abstractly. In the early 1990s, traveling through Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow on the first Pentagon study of the newly independent Slavic states, I watched societies in upheaval and identified Ukraine and Belarus as “awkward states”, buffer spaces too vital to be left alone and too contested to be settled by institutional habit.

Neither state fit comfortably into a Western or a Russian sphere. The West’s answer was to fall back on default structures, NATO and the EU, as vehicles for absorbing the rest of Eastern Europe, an approach that worked well enough for Poland, Hungary, and Romania but left the Ukraine-Belarus question unresolved for three decades. Russian leaders, meanwhile, never stopped viewing Ukraine and Belarus as buffer zones essential to their own security perimeter rather than as genuinely independent states.

Washington largely failed to register how durable that Russian view was. Then–Vice President Biden declared in 2011 that the United States regarded spheres of influence as “19th-century thinking.” Then–Secretary of State Kerry, reacting to Crimea in 2014, said much the same: that no one “in the 21st century” behaves “in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”

Both statements were, in effect, announcements that the American foreign-policy establishment considered the entire premise Stalin operated on, spheres of influence, buffer states, the subordination of smaller nations’ choices to a larger neighbor’s security anxieties, to be a historical relic.

It wasn’t. Putin’s disputes with George W. Bush over Ukraine’s 2004–05 Orange Revolution already signaled his real objective: keeping Ukraine either like Belarus or run by leaders willing to serve as loyal Russian clients rather than pursue Western integration. His July 2021 essay and the accompanying military doctrine declaring permanent civilizational conflict with the West were the fulfillment of a trajectory visible three decades earlier, not a rupture from it.

Putin’s Ukraine: Conquest as Restoration

Putin inherited none of the Soviet apparatus that let Stalin do this quietly, from the inside. Ukraine is a sovereign, internationally recognized state, a member of the United Nations, and after 2014 and especially after February 2022, a state at open war with its neighbor. Putin’s instrument therefore had to be invasion rather than internal administrative terror but the underlying claim is recognizably the same one Stalin’s system operated on without ever having to state it explicitly: that Ukraine’s separateness is illegitimate, that its resources and territory belong by right to a larger Russian project, and that Ukrainian national identity is a problem to be corrected rather than a fact to be respected.

Putin has had to be more explicit about this than Stalin ever needed to be, because he has had to argue for something Stalin could simply assume. His July 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” makes the claim in so many words: it explicitly denies Ukrainian national identity and statehood, framing Ukraine’s separation from Russia as a historical aberration to be corrected. Read against Stalin’s record, this is not a new theory of Russian-Ukrainian relations. It is the old imperial premise, restated for an audience that had assumed such premises were extinct.

The invasion that followed pursued Stalinist ends by wartime means. Deportation of Ukrainian children into Russia and Russian-controlled territory, filtration operations in occupied areas, and the annexation of agricultural and industrial regions in the east and south all echo the logic of demographic engineering and resource capture that ran through the 1930s. Grain, again, is a weapon, not through induced famine this time, but through the blockade and mining of Black Sea approaches and Russia’s 2023 withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, a decision that manufactured a global food crisis as deliberately as Stalin’s procurement quotas manufactured a Ukrainian one. Ukraine’s own countermove, the “Grain from Ukraine” humanitarian program launched that same autumn, using its agricultural exports to build diplomatic credit across Africa and the Middle East rather than merely absorbing aid — is itself a pointed inversion of the earlier history: the same crop that Stalin turned into a weapon against Ukrainians, Kyiv has turned into an instrument of its own international legitimacy.

Continuity of Logic, Divergence of Method

The comparison is not that Stalin and Putin are the same kind of leader, or that the Holodomor and the current war are morally equivalent atrocities in scale or mechanism: they are not. The comparison that matters is structural.

Both men approached Ukraine as a strategic asset whose value was instrumental to Moscow rather than intrinsic to its own people. Both treated Ukrainian national distinctiveness as an obstacle rather than a legitimate fact. Both used food and resource flows as instruments of coercion. Both accompanied material extraction with an assault on the idea of Ukrainian identity itself, Stalin through Russification and the liquidation of Ukrainian cultural elites, Putin through the claim that Ukrainian nationhood is fictional and through the deportation and re-education of Ukrainian children in occupied and Russian territory.

There is a useful reframing worth carrying into this comparison, one that applies to how the current war should be understood generally: the more analytically useful axis is not “democracy versus authoritarianism” but “sovereignty versus imperial subordination.”

Ukraine’s governance imperfections don’t negate the nature of Russia’s project any more than the flaws of the 1930s Soviet client states negated the nature of Stalin’s. The core Russian foreign-policy premise that former Soviet space lacks full sovereignty and remains within Moscow’s legitimate zone of control runs continuously from Stalin’s Ukraine through Georgia in 2008 to Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Putin’s essay simply gave that premise its clearest public articulation.

The divergence between the two men is a function of context rather than intent.

Stalin operated Ukraine as a subject territory inside a state that had already absorbed it; his terror could be domestic, bureaucratic, and largely hidden from outside scrutiny by the isolation of the Soviet system. Putin is operating against a sovereign state embedded in an international order with satellite imagery, instant reporting, a NATO alliance whose eastward expansion he has spent two decades resenting, and a Ukrainian government and population that has organized both military and civil resistance on a scale nothing in the 1930s permitted. Where Stalin could starve a province quietly, Putin has had to fight a war in the open, under sanctions, with his own economy and military reputation increasingly on the line. The method changed because the world changed. The premise, Ukraine as resource, not as a people entitled to self-determination, did not.

Why the Distinction Matters Now

This is not merely a historical curiosity.

It bears directly on how the current war is likely to be understood, negotiated, and possibly ended.

If Putin’s war is read simply as a 2022 aberration, a Ukraine-specific overreach that a negotiated settlement or a change in Kremlin leadership might resolve, then the diplomatic logic of the current shuttle process, aimed at freezing lines and restoring some version of normalized relations, makes sense on its own terms.

But if the war is read, as both the Stalin comparison and my own 1990s field assessment suggest it should be, as the latest expression of a much older Russian state disposition toward Ukraine, one that predates Putin, predates the Soviet Union’s collapse, and indeed predates the Soviet Union itself, then any settlement that leaves that underlying disposition unaddressed is a pause rather than a resolution.

Territory changes hands, casualties accumulate, and the negotiating table resets, but the strategic premise that produced the Holodomor and produced the 2022 invasion remains available to the next Russian leader who inherits it.

There is a line from General Pasquale Preziosa’s foreword to my book on the global war in Ukraine that applies with particular force here: memory is a strategic resource. Forgetting the Partnership for Peace era, the cycles of failed resets with Moscow, and the lessons of the 1990s narrows Western options and condemns policymakers to repeat familiar errors. The Biden-era conviction that spheres of influence were an artifact of the 19th century was one such error, and it was made possible by a kind of institutional amnesia about what Stalin’s Soviet Union had already demonstrated about how Moscow regards Ukraine. Structure outlives mood. The structural fact, geography, resource endowment, and a persistent Russian claim on Ukrainian sovereignty, proved more durable than the West’s post–Cold War assumption that such claims belonged to history.

For readers of this site’s broader work on the war’s reshaping of Russia’s domestic future and global position, this is the deeper argument the tactical and operational reporting sits on top of: Ukraine’s war is not simply a contest over borders.

It is the latest round in a century-long argument over whether Ukraine is a people or a resource, an argument Moscow has answered the same way twice, a hundred years apart, by different means.

By Robbin Laird

On August 31, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, Narendra Modi told Vladimir Putin, “We must move away from endless war towards an end to the war.” He described a peaceful resolution of all issues as the call of humanity and said that this is India’s message.

Eleven days later Modi was hosting Putin in New Delhi. It was the first time since 2022 that Putin had traveled abroad to attend a BRICS summit. At their Friday meeting the two leaders spoke of raising bilateral trade from about $65 billion to $100 billion by 2030, reviewed defense cooperation, and discussed an annual India-Russia summit around the end of the year.

It would be easy to read these two encounters as contradictory, or to pick one and call it the real India. Both are the real India. The public appeal for peace and the hospitality in Delhi are two sides of a hedging strategy. India is holding as many options open as it can while its largest neighbor and rival, China, grows stronger, and while a war launched by Putin reshapes the world around it.

This article places that hedge inside the argument of my book, The Global War in Ukraine. The book argues that Putin’s war has narrowed Russia’s future at home and its reach abroad, and that its greatest beneficiary has been China. India is the most consequential test of that argument in the Global South. Its behavior confirms the narrowing of Russian reach, but it complicates the story in two ways. India is not decoupling from Russia; it is restructuring the relationship. And India has its own reasons to keep Russia from becoming wholly dependent on Beijing, which slows the very decline its hedging reflects.

What the war did to Russia

The book makes three claims about Russia.

The first is domestic. The war economy has become less a means of territorial conquest than a mechanism for concentrating control. The security services and the military-industrial complex are its principal beneficiaries, and by late 2025 defense and security absorbed roughly two-fifths of federal spending. Inflation, a 17 per cent key rate, labor shortages and a widening deficit were squeezing the civilian economy, and thousands of scientists had left. That creates a trap. Ending the war would unravel the power structure built around it, while continuing it consumes the base that structure stands on.

The second is Russia’s global position. The war has contracted Russian influence from the Baltic to Central Asia and the Caucasus, ended Germany’s energy relationship with Moscow, and produced a united and militarized NATO with Finland and Sweden inside it.

The third is subordination to China. The yuan has displaced the dollar in Russia’s foreign-currency trading, Chinese refiners have extracted discounts of 10 to 19 per cent on Russian crude, and Beijing has become the largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels. Russia has become a price-taker in its most important export markets.

India fits into this picture as the largest Global South customer for Russian energy and arms. Its choices decide whether Russia’s pivot to Asia is a partnership of options or a dependence on two buyers, and every marginal Indian decision shifts Moscow’s bargaining position toward Beijing.

Stock and flow

The most useful distinction in Indian defense trade is between flow and stock. SIPRI measures flow, meaning deliveries in a five-year window. Russia’s share of Indian arms imports fell from 70 per cent in 2011-15 to 51 per cent in 2016-20 and 40 per cent in 2021-25. France now supplies about 29 per cent and Israel about 15 per cent.

Two cautions apply. The decline predates the war, since 2019-23 was already the first five-year period since 1960-64 in which Russia supplied less than half of India’s arms imports. And the decline has stalled at the margin, because Russia’s share was 36 per cent in 2020-24, so the latest window shows a slight uptick.

The book measures stock, the installed base. About 90 per cent of the Indian Army’s equipment is of Russian origin, along with roughly 70 per cent of the Air Force’s combat aircraft. The Su-30MKI alone equips 14 of the IAF’s 30 squadrons, and the Navy’s only operational carrier flies Russian MiG-29Ks. Flows can change within a few years, while stocks take decades. Delhi treats the dependence as a “bridge” to be managed down over a decade or more, because an abrupt break would hurt the readiness of units facing the Chinese army on the Line of Actual Control before it hurt Russian operations in Ukraine. So “India is reducing exposure” and “India remains deeply exposed” are both true, at different levels.

The arms portfolio

The clearest recent signal is the Su-57. There was no signed deal to abandon. India left the fifth-generation co-development program back in 2018, and this summer it declined a fresh offer. Moscow had offered the Su-57E with licensed domestic production and technology transfer, and New Delhi turned it down, leaving Algeria as the only publicly identified export customer. Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh said India had no plans to acquire a new version of the Sukhois and was actively considering upgrading the existing fleet. The position hardened over the year, from an open question in March to a categorical rejection by late July. The likelier drivers are cost, capability and the indigenous AMCA, along with the Rafale. The IAF is reportedly close to a deal for 114 Rafales, 94 of them built locally.

The alternative to buying new is the “Super Sukhoi” upgrade. The IAF plans to bring about 75 per cent of its Su-30MKI fleet, more than 200 of roughly 272 aircraft, to the new standard. The upgrade centers on the Indian-made Virupaksha AESA radar and new mission computers, with a first prototype expected around 2028-29. Much of this is indigenous, but the airframe and engines are Russian in origin. The AL-31FP engines are built under license by HAL, and Russia has offered the more powerful AL-41. India is still evaluating its options. The result is Indian sensors and weapons on a Russian airframe. Moscow’s role shrinks from prime supplier to limited partner.

The December 2025 Putin-Modi summit formalized that shift. The joint statement said the defense partnership was being reoriented toward joint research and development and the production of advanced platforms. I described this in the book as Russia’s move from India’s dominant armory to an embedded defense-industrial partner, with joint manufacture of spares and components for Russian-origin equipment inside India. Russia keeps a stake in the Indian arsenal but earns less per platform and holds less leverage.

Yet the pattern is not one-directional. In late March the Defence Acquisition Council cleared about $25 billion of proposals, including five additional S-400 systems and a Tunguska contract with Rosoboronexport. That came despite the S-400 delivery delays I document in the book. India buys Russian where nothing else fits, in layered air defense, and goes elsewhere or indigenous where alternatives exist.

Oil: hedging on supply, not sentiment

Before the war Russian crude was about 2 per cent of India’s supply. Steep discounts from April 2022 transformed the trade, and Russia became India’s largest source. In 2025-26 Russia supplied about 30.3 per cent of India’s crude imports, worth $40.8 billion.

The 2026 pattern has less to do with Ukraine than with the Gulf. The Iran war began with US-Israeli strikes on February 28. In February, cargoes from within the Strait of Hormuz accounted for 53 per cent of India’s crude imports. Russia’s share of Indian crude reached a record 51 per cent in July, as disruptions to Middle Eastern supplies increased refiners’ reliance on Russian oil. One tracker put the July share higher, and another counted Russian crude at 18.7 per cent of India’s imports in February against nearly 50 per cent in July, as Middle East imports fell by 63 per cent.

Then came the reversal. Russian imports fell 26.3 per cent in August as Chinese refiners outbid Indian buyers. That report is from an aggregator, but it is consistent with other coverage. In the first two weeks of September, imports were about 30 per cent below the August average, which experts attributed to attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, with Iraq emerging as a key alternative. Pressure from Washington adds a third force, and its history this year shows the hedge at work. On February 2 President Trump announced a deal cutting US tariffs on Indian goods from 50 to 18 per cent, and said that Modi had agreed to stop buying Russian oil. The joint statement did not mention Russian oil, and the Indian government has neither confirmed nor denied the pledge, saying that its purchases are guided by national interest. An executive order provides that a 25 per cent tariff would return if India resumes such purchases, and Indian refiners avoided Russian cargoes for March and April delivery. The Iran war began less than a month later. I have not found reporting that Washington has reimposed the duty, although pressure for tariffs of up to 100 per cent on buyers of Russian energy is growing.

None of these forces is about Putin or the war’s morality. Indian refiners treat Russian crude as one grade in a portfolio, taking more when the Gulf is disrupted and less when supply is scarce, costly or politically penalized. That is hedging rather than alignment.

For Russia, the picture matches what the book describes. Chinese refiners winning cargoes with the advantage of the Northern Sea Route show China’s power as a price-setter. India is the alternative outlet that keeps that power in check. My inference is that every barrel India buys reduces Russia’s dependence on Beijing, and every barrel India forgoes increases it.

The domestic trap and Indian choices

India’s decisions touch the domestic logic of the Russian war economy at three points.

The first is revenue. India and China are the biggest buyers of Russian oil, which is seen as helping Moscow replenish its budget. The book argues that the war economy is sustained by centralizing resources and pressing the civilian economy, so export revenue matters most when everything else is squeezed.

The second is the defense industry. It is both the main beneficiary of the war economy and, as the book shows, degraded by sanctions and by the demands of the war. A lost Indian fighter order narrows its export outlets and increases its reliance on state budgets. That is my inference, not a finding from the book.

The third is legitimacy. Because of the ICC warrant, Putin’s personal diplomacy is largely confined to forums such as the SCO and BRICS. The warrant was not enforced during his Indian visit in December 2025, and India bears the reputational cost of hosting him. For Putin, a Delhi summit with Xi and a bilateral with Modi is worth more than any trade target, because it shows a country of 1.4 billion still receiving him.

India also benefits from the peace track. US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Putin in Moscow this month with a proposal to end the war. Modi’s message from Bishkek costs him little and keeps him positioned as an interlocutor if talks advance. And the book’s paradox applies here as well: peace may be harder for Putin than war, because ending it could unravel the structure he has built around it. India’s hedging horizon runs past any ceasefire.

The third party: China

The book’s central claim is that Putin’s war has strengthened China at Russia’s expense, and India’s hedge has to be read against that. India and Russia are the two continental powers Beijing is working to reshape. India’s strategy has two aims that pull against each other. It wants to reduce its own dependence on a Russia that is weaker and more reliant on China, and it wants to keep Russia as a “residual pole” in Asia so that Moscow does not fall entirely into Beijing’s orbit.

That tension explains the pattern. India buys S-400s because nothing else fills that layer, and it refuses the Su-57 because a new fifth-generation dependence would be deeper and riskier. It keeps buying Russian oil, which supports Russian bargaining power against China.

There is also a Chinese track. Modi and Xi were expected to hold talks on the sidelines of the BRICS summit, in a meeting that could help consolidate a diplomatic thaw after the 2020 border tensions. India is hedging against China with Japan and the West, while also engaging Beijing directly. The question I pose at the end of the India chapter remains open: how will India fare if a Chinese-centered order takes shape in which both Russia and India are junior players?

Japan and the wider hedge

The Indo-Pacific track is visible in the exercise Veer Guardian 26. It runs from September 9 to 21 at Jodhpur, with three Japanese F-2 fighters and 110 personnel, and it is the first time Japan has sent fighter jets to India. Japan’s defense minister visited in August, and the two countries signed a maritime security arrangement that month. Chinese state media portrayed the deployment as an attempt to strengthen coordination against Beijing. A retired Indian air marshal cautioned against reading it only through a China lens, since India drills with many partners, while acknowledging that such events make Beijing wary.

Japan is also deeply involved in Ukraine’s war, as the book documents. It signed a security agreement with Kyiv in June 2024 and, in April 2025, agreed to share high-resolution satellite radar imagery with Ukraine. Tokyo has also sanctioned entities in China, India, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan over alleged support for Russia’s war. So India is deepening military ties with a country that backs Ukraine and has penalized Indian firms over Russia. This is compartmentalization. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar’s formula, quoted in the book, lists engaging America, managing China, cultivating Europe, reassuring Russia and bringing Japan into play. Russia sits in the “reassuring” slot, which is not the language of alliance.

What would change the reading

Six developments would show whether this is a durable shift or a tactical mix.

• The Rafale signing. A deal for 114 aircraft, mostly built in India, would confirm the Su-57 refusal as part of a coherent fighter strategy.
• S-400 delivery and follow-through. Timely delivery of the additional systems would suggest that Russian air defense remains a sustained priority. Further slippage would strengthen the case for alternatives.
• The Super Sukhoi engine choice. Selecting the AL-41 would deepen Russian lineage in the fleet. An indigenous or non-Russian option would mark a real break.
• Russian crude once the Gulf normalizes. If the share stays well below the July peak when supply recovers, the shift is strategic. If it rebounds, this year’s swings were driven by supply and price.
• The US tariff track. Reimposition of the 25 per cent duty under the February executive order, or legislation allowing tariffs of up to 100 per cent on buyers of Russian energy, would force a choice India has so far been able to defer.
• The year-end summit and any ceasefire. A visit by Modi to Russia, or a settlement that eases sanctions, would test whether India’s hedge stays a hedge.

Conclusion

Modi’s words at Bishkek and his welcome for Putin in New Delhi belong to the same strategy. India is reducing Russian dependence in new arms purchases, keeping the installed Russian base alive with Indian sensors and weapons, buying Russian oil when supply and price make sense, and building ties with Japan, France, the United States and, cautiously, China.

The Indian case supports the book’s argument about Russia’s shrinking reach. Russia has lost the prime-supplier role in Indian defense, watches Chinese refiners outbid its oldest large customer, and depends on a few forums where leaders will receive it. It also shows how uneven the decline is. Russia remains embedded in India’s arsenal, is a larger energy supplier than before the war, and benefits from India’s wish to keep it from becoming Beijing’s junior partner.

India is not leaving Russia. It is managing a partner that has been weakened by its own war and increasingly by China, while making sure it never depends on any single power again.

Bibliography

All online sources accessed September 18, 2026. Sources marked † are aggregators, forum reposts or exam-preparation sites and should be checked against primary reporting before publication.

Bishkek SCO summit and the December 2025 Putin-Modi summit

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The New Delhi BRICS summit, September 2026

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Arms trade: SIPRI data and procurement decisions

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Tribune India. “Tensions with China, Pak driving India’s arms imports shift towards Western suppliers: SIPRI.” March 2025. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/tensions-with-china-pak-driving-indias-arms-imports-shift-towards-western-suppliers-sipri

Deccan Herald. “India again tops global arms imports, Russia main supplier: SIPRI.” March 11, 2024. https://www.deccanherald.com/india/india-again-tops-global-arms-imports-russia-main-supplier-sipri-2931533

India’s World. “India’s Arms Imports: Shift in Structure, Scale Remains.” April 8, 2026. https://indiasworld.in/indias-arms-imports-shift-in-structure-scale-remains/

The Su-57 decision and the Super Sukhoi upgrade

The National Interest (David Axe). “Why India Rejected Russia’s Advanced Su-57 Fighter Jet.” Republished May 1, 2026. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/why-india-rejected-russias-advanced-su-57-fighter-jet-196067

Kyiv Post. “India Rejects Russia’s Su-57E Fighter Jet Offer, Bets on Domestically Produced AMCA, 260 Su-MKIs.” August 4, 2026. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/81720

Eurasian Times. “Su-57 For IAF: India Rules Out New Sukhoi Fighter Jets, To Prioritize Su-30 MKI Upgrades.” July 2026. https://www.eurasiantimes.com/su-57-for-iaf-india-rules-out-new-sukhoi-fighter-jets-to-prioritize-su-30-mki-upgrades/

Defence Security Asia. “India Slams the Door on Russia’s Su-57 Stealth Fighter as Defence Secretary Confirms ‘No New Sukhois’.” August 1, 2026. https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/india-rejects-russia-su57-stealth-fighter-super-sukhoi-rafale-mrfa-amca/

† Defence News India (forum repost). “India to Transform 75% of Su-30MKI Fleet into Super Sukhoi, Targeting 80% Indigenisation.” October 2025. https://defence.in/threads/india-to-transform-75-of-su-30mki-fleet-into-super-sukhoi-targeting-80-indigenisation-with-next-gen-combat-capabilities.15734/

† Defence News India (forum repost). “Russia to Support India’s Su-30MKI Super Sukhoi Upgrade Program with Flight Control Integration and Certification Assistance.” July 2026. https://defence.in/threads/russia-to-support-indias-su-30mki-super-sukhoi-upgrade-program-with-flight-control-integration-and-certification-assistance.18165/

The Defense News. “Russia Offers AL-41 Engine Upgrade for IAF Su-30MKI Fleet in Super Sukhoi Modernisation Push.” 2025. https://www.thedefensenews.com/news-details/Russia-Offers-AL-41-Engine-Upgrade-for-IAF-Su-30MKI-Fleet-in-Super-Sukhoi-Modernisation-Push/

Tribune India. “Russia offers Sukhoi-57 engine for India’s Sukhoi-30MKI upgrade.” https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/russia-offers-sukhoi-57-engine-for-indias-sukhoi-30mki-upgrade

Energy

ThePrint. “Russian crude never left India’s import mix. It made up 1/3rd of oil imports from 2024 to 2026.” March 9, 2026. https://theprint.in/economy/russian-crude-never-left-indias-import-mix-it-made-up-1-3rd-of-oil-imports-from-2024-to-2026/2874224/

Vortexa. “India likely to maintain Russian oil purchases.” March 3, 2026. https://www.vortexa.com/insights/india-maintain-russian-oil-imports

ThePrint. “India’s Russian crude imports set to fall in September amid tighter supply, Iraq a key alternative.” September 14, 2026. https://theprint.in/economy/indias-russian-crude-imports-set-to-fall-in-september-amid-tighter-supply-iraq-a-key-alternative/3042166/

† EcoNiti. “India’s Russian oil imports fall 26% in August as China outbids.” September 3, 2026. https://www.econiti.org/daily-news/2026-09-03/2026-09-03-india-russia-oil-imports-fall-august-venezuela/

† APAC Media. “India-Russia Crude Oil Imports Worth $40.8 Billion Face Trump’s 100% Tariff Threat.” September 16, 2026. https://apacnewsnetwork.com/2026/09/india-russia-crude-oil-imports-trump-100-percent-tariff-threat/

The U.S. tariff deal and Russian oil, 2026

CNBC. “Trump says U.S. and India reached trade deal, will lower tariffs immediately.” February 2, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/02/trump-india-trade-deal-tariffs.html

The Wire. “MEA Will Give Information on Russian Oil Purchase, US Deal Won’t Hurt Indian Farmers, Says Piyush Goyal.” February 7, 2026. https://m.thewire.in/article/agriculture/mea-will-give-information-on-russian-oil-purchase-us-deal-wont-hurt-indian-farmers-says-piyush-goyal

Reuters (Nidhi Verma), via Yahoo News. “Indian refiners avoid Russian oil in push for US trade deal.” February 8, 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/indian-refiners-avoid-russian-oil-045706762.html

Chatham House. “Despite reset in India–US relations, New Delhi retains commitment to strategic hedging.” February 2026. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/02/despite-reset-india-us-relations-new-delhi-retains-commitment-strategic-hedging

The National. “Trump’s new tariff threat risks cutting off Asia’s Russian oil lifeline as Gulf supply falls.” September 18, 2026. https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/energy/2026/09/18/india-china-us-tariffs-russian-oil-lindsey-graham-act/

Japan and the Indo-Pacific

The Hill (opinion). “Japan joins India in military exercises to counter China.” September 2026. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/6090561-japan-india-veer-guardian-jets/

South China Morning Post. “What Japan’s coming fighter jet deployment to India means for China.” August 29, 2026. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3365697/what-japans-coming-fighter-jet-deployment-india-means-china

Indian Defence News. “Japanese Fighter Jets To Join India in Veer Guardian 2026 Amid Rising China Tensions.” September 2026. https://www.indiandefensenews.in/2026/09/japanese-fighter-jets-to-join-india-in.html

Vision Times. “Japan Sends Fighter Jets to India as Tokyo and New Delhi Eye China.” September 4, 2026. https://www.visiontimes.com/2026/09/04/japan-sends-fighter-jets-to-india-as-tokyo-and-new-delhi-eye-china.html

Al Jazeera. “Japan sanctions China-based firms accused of supporting war in Ukraine.” June 21, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/6/21/japan-sanctions-china-based-firms-accused-of-supporting-war-in-ukraine

The first installment in this series on General Pasquale Preziosa’s foreword to The Unfinished Pillar takes up the argument that gives the book its title — and its sharpest edge. The unfinished character of the European pillar, Preziosa argues, was never primarily an institutional story. It is a story about the growing distance between political structure and strategic capacity.

An Unfinished Project, Revisited Under Different Conditions

Robbin Laird’s original analysis dates to the last years of the Cold War, when the strategic architecture that had structured Europe for four decades was dissolving. The questions that produced it — how to build a meaningful European defense capacity within the Atlantic Alliance, how to convert economic and industrial weight into usable military power — have returned under conditions the original analysis could not have anticipated: major war on the continent, renewed nuclear coercion, and open uncertainty over how responsibilities within the Alliance will be distributed going forward.

What makes the book valuable, in Preziosa’s reading, is precisely that it isn’t a straight retrospective. It places the strategic imagination of 1991 — actors reasoning before they knew how events would unfold — directly beside the strategic reality that took thirty-five years to arrive. History, predictably, didn’t move in a straight line. The European pillar was neither completed nor abandoned. NATO enlarged. Political consultation deepened. The European Union acquired security and defense mechanisms that would have been difficult to imagine at the outset of the 1990s. And yet, across the same period, Europe allowed much of the military and industrial substance required for large-scale direct defense to erode.

That divergence — institutional adaptation running ahead of strategic completion — is the thread that runs through the whole foreword, and it’s worth sitting with before moving further into the series.

The Harder Problem: Options Stop Being Compatible

The more demanding issue, in Preziosa’s reading, is that the relationship among strategic options doesn’t stay fixed over time. Objectives that look mutually compatible at one stage of a transition can become difficult to pursue simultaneously as actors learn, perceptions shift, institutions evolve, technologies develop, and earlier decisions reshape the environment in which later decisions have to be made.

This is a different claim from simply saying “predictions were wrong.” It’s a claim about the structure of the problem itself: preserving options is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. Strategy also has to keep reassessing whether the whole portfolio of objectives it’s chasing still hangs together as the system around it changes. That reassessment matters most precisely during periods of systemic transition, because optimizing against present conditions is exactly the move that can produce future vulnerability once the structure of the environment itself shifts — which is the same mechanism, seen from a different angle, that produced the adaptation debt discussed in the first installment.

What a Robust Strategy Actually Looks Like

Preziosa draws a distinction here that’s worth stating plainly: a robust strategy is not one that correctly predicts the future. It’s one that can confront the present without using up its capacity to confront a different future. That’s the deeper meaning he attaches to strategic prudence under uncertainty, and it’s also why anticipation shouldn’t be confused with prediction.

No government, military organization, or alliance can know with confidence which combination of threats, technologies, political disruptions, economic dependencies, or military innovations will define the next crisis. The purpose of anticipatory strategy, on this account, isn’t to guess correctly. It’s to avoid becoming strategically dependent on any single guess being correct. Preserving that freedom of action requires things that don’t show up well on an efficiency ledger: diversity, redundancy, knowledge, industrial depth, institutional flexibility, alternative supply relationships, political room for maneuver. Some of this looks like waste under normal conditions, precisely because its strategic value only becomes visible once normal conditions stop holding. What looks like redundancy in peacetime is freedom of action in crisis.

Why This Belongs Before the Geography Chapter

This argument sets up the next installment for a reason. Once you accept that strategy is a wager made under conditions that will keep changing, and that no single set of institutional arrangements can be optimized once and left alone, the question of where strategic weight sits within an alliance stops being a fixed fact and starts being something that has to be continuously reassessed. That’s exactly the shift Preziosa traces next — from a European pillar organized around a single Franco-German engine to one distributed across a genuinely networked set of contributors.

Next in the Series

Installment three turns to that redistribution directly: how the strategic geography of European defense has changed since the original Franco-German framing, why the accession of Finland and Sweden altered the geometry of deterrence across Northern Europe, and why Preziosa treats Ukraine not simply as a recipient of Western support but as an operational teacher within the wider alliance.