India’s foreign policy has long been marketed as “strategic autonomy.” However, deal with Ukraine has now exposed that slogan as calculated opportunism. While New Delhi continues to benefit from Russian oil, weapons, spares and strategic goodwill, it is quietly expanding defence cooperation with Moscow’s battlefield adversary Ukraine. India’s defense ties and technology exchanges with Ukraine irk Russia primarily by undercutting Moscow’s geopolitical leverage and eroding its long-standing monopoly over India’s military hardware. By engaging Kyiv for critical maintenance, aero-engines, and battlefield technologies, India deliberately reduces its traditional dependence on Russia. Modi’s August 2024 visit to Ukraine marked a key shift, with both sides agreeing to hold the second India-Ukraine Joint Working Group on Military-Technical Cooperation in India. By April 2026, the track had matured further. In April 2026, President Zelenskyy stated that a security cooperation arrangement with India was being finalized. Taken together, these moves end the fiction that India’s Ukraine outreach is limited to humanitarian aid or peace diplomacy. It was no smaller exposure of Indian dual game. Publicly, New Delhi reassures the Kremlin of “time-tested ties.”........

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