Russia is secretly acquiring special-purpose goods from India and exploring the possibility of building complexes in the country for components to support its invasion of Ukraine, writes the Financial Times, citing leaked Russian state correspondence.< /p>
Russia's Ministry of Industry and Trade, which is responsible for weapons production, has already developed confidential plans as early as October 2022 to spend about $1 billion to secure secret channels to access key electronics.
The plan, revealed in letters to an obscure trade advertising body linked to Russia's secret services, calls for the use of the "substantial reserves" of rupees accumulated in Russian banks from increasing sales of Russian oil to India.
In the documents, Russian and Indian partners talk about dual-use technologies that are subject to Western scrutiny. Moscow even offers to pour serious investment into a Russian-Indian enterprise for the development and production of electronics.
Alexander Gaponov, deputy director of the radio-electronics division at the Ministry of Economy, is specifically responsible for the correspondence. This is a particularly sensitive area for Russia, as the country is dependent on foreign-made electronics that go into missiles, drones and other military machines.
It is he who, in October 2022, turns to the so-called Consortium for Foreign Economic Activity and Interstate Industrial Cooperation to draw up a plan for access to critical components through India. The director of the consortium, Vadim Poida, answers that "specific plans" together with the Russian electronics industry and "representatives of Indian business and certain states", and the potential to realize the Kremlin's accumulated rupees is high.
Poida presents a five-step plan to enable Russia to spend its rupees and secure a steady flow of dual-use components. It envisages Moscow creating a "closed system for payments between Russian and Indian companies" outside the control of western countries, including "payments in digital assets".
The consortium predicts that Russia can buy components for about 100 billion rubles, incl. parts for "telecommunications, servers and other sophisticated electronic equipment" previously bought from Western countries. Members of the group, Pojda wrote, started pilot projects for the production in India of Russian-developed components and took the necessary measures to "hide the information about the participation of Russian representatives in the enterprises in question".
While it is not clear to what extent the plan has been implemented, bilateral trade figures show that Russia's ties with India have deepened in recent years, particularly with regard to certain goods specifically mentioned in the correspondence in question.
India is among the biggest buyers of Russian oil, with bilateral trade reaching a record $66 billion in the 2023-24 financial year, or five times the volume realized before the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.