Reuters: India is pushing Russia out of the arms market, and one early success story is Armenia
India is pushing Russia out of the arms market and has already disrupted Russia’s monopoly on arming Armenia, a former Soviet republic, Reuters writes.
As noted, India’s one early success story is Armenia, where it posted a defense attaché for the first time last year.
India sold 43% of the arms Armenia imported between 2022 and 2024, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, up from almost nothing between 2016 and 2018.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to transform India into a global factory floor has produced billions of dollars of low-cost iPhones and pharmaceuticals. Now he hopes to add missiles, helicopters and battleships to the shopping carts of foreign governments.
New Delhi will also sharply increase the number of defense attachés in its foreign missions as part of a new program that will see the government directly negotiate some arms deals, four Indian officials said.
India is particularly targeting governments which have long relied on Russia for arms, two of the sources said. India’s plans mark an unprecedented effort by the government to inject itself into the recruitment and financing of foreign buyers as the world is rearming and longstanding geopolitical relationships are being recast.
As noted, one turning point was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to an Indian official tasked with growing arms exports. The war in Ukraine left other nations that had historically relied on Washington and Moscow – the world’s two largest arms exporters – scrambling for alternatives. India produced $14.8 billion of arms in 2023-2024 fiscal year, up 62% since 2020, government data show.
Delhi is focusing its arms-export strategy on countries in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. India plans to dispatch at least 20 new defense attachés to foreign embassies by March 2026, three Indian defense officials said. Their host nations include Algeria, Morocco, Guyana, Tanzania, Argentina, Ethiopia, and Cambodia, they said. The attachés have been tasked with promoting Indian weapons.
