"INDIA IS A MAJOR GLOBAL PLAYER AND CANNOT BE ARM-TWISTED"

On the eve of his visit to India, VLADIMIR PUTIN gave an extensive 100-minute interview to India Today Group TV channels at the Kremlin. The 73-year-old Russian president deftly fielded every question put to him. The most significant ones discussed his war in Ukraine, the American sanctions and punitive trade tariffs on India for buying Russian oil. His answers offered sharp, incisive and dispassionate views on some of the most pressing issues facing Russia, India and the world.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin's long-delayed summit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his first in four years, unfolds at a moment when US president Donald Trump is violently rearranging the global chessboard. A time when the world is sharply polarised by war, sanctions and shifting power centres, forcing nations to rethink old assumptions and quietly redraw their strategic maps. In this charged backdrop, Putin's India visit is far more than a routine bilateral; it is a signal, to the West and to the Global South, about where Moscow believes its long-term partners lie and for India to tell the US that it cannot be bullied into submission. Both sides look to reboot their relationship.

In a rare and exclusive interview to the India Today Group's TV team of Anjana Om Kashyap and Geeta Mohan at the Kremlin on the eve of his visit, Putin spoke for 100 minutes on a wide range of issues that went beyond India-Russia relations. The Russian president was by turns combative, didactic and unexpectedly warm, especially when speaking of India and Modi, whom he calls his "friend" and whose setting of "challenging tasks" for the nation he praises. For Putin, New Delhi is not just a legacy ally, but a central player in what he describes as the emerging power centres of the Global South: BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and a looser coalition of Asian and African economies that are reshaping trade, finance and technology.

On India-Russia relations, he says the future lies not just in defence, but as much in high-technology cooperation in nuclear energy, space, shipbuilding, aviation and, crucially, artificial intelligence. That's besides an ambitious agenda to correct trade imbalances, and not by diktat. Putin criticises western attempts to pressure India over discounted Russian oil and sanctions, arguing that some actors "dislike India's growing role in international markets" and are using political tools to distort fair competition.