I agree energy undergirds the contemporary India Russia relationship but that is a very recent phenomena, a product of Russia’s war on Ukraine. India buys it be

I agree energy undergirds the contemporary India Russia relationship but that is a very recent phenomena, a product of Russia’s war on Ukraine. India buys it because it is cheap and helps with post pandemic recovery. There is no guarantee India will continue buying oil from Russia in the quantities that it does now once the discount goes away. Some diversification aside, it is cheaper and faster to get oil from the Gulf, India’s traditional oil supplier, so it remains to be seen just how long Indian oil purchases from Russia will last. So I wouldn’t call it permanent feature just yet. As far as Indian influence on Russia, there is some, perhaps not as much as Indian strategists would like to assume. But it would be a folly to assume Russia wants to be a client state of China. There is precedent for historic distrust and miscalculation[1]. They too would like options, they did in the end allow for Brahmos missiles to be exported to Philippines ( squarely pointed at the Chinese) so suzerainty is not established yet. China also does not want to get too close to Russia, given its larger economic relationship with the West. You can see the stressors emerging in China driving a hard bargain for Siberian gas pipelines. In the end everyone is balancing here. [1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-russia-lessons-putin https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-russia-lesso...