PASSEX: India-Russia

On Indian Navy Day (December 4), India and Russia held a two-day Passage Exercise in the Eastern Indian Ocean. The exercise aimed to enhance interoperability, imbibing best practices and improving understandabilities between the navies. During the exercise, the navies held weapon firing, advanced surface warfare exercise and advanced anti-submarine exercise, helicopter operations, seamanship exercises.

Indian Navy was represented by the anti-submarine corvette Kadmatt, indigenously built guided missile frigate Shivalik. The Russian Navy was represented by the anti-submarine Admiral Panteleyev and medium ocean tanker Pechenga.

The exercise signifies the long-term strategic relationship between India and Russia.

Other Exercises between India and Russia

INDRA

INDRA is a joint bi-annual exercise between India and Russia. It was begun in 2003. The exercise involves anti-submarine operations and live firing drills

TSENTR

India participated in TSENTR in 2019. It is a part of the annual series of exercises that form part of the Russian Armed Forces annual training cycle. The annual series of exercise rotates through four main strategic commands of Russia. They are ZAPAD (West), VOSTOK (East), TSENTR (Centre), KAVKAS (South).

Along with India, other countries such as Kazakhstan, China, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan also participated in the exercise.

Such annual exercises began to gain international significance after Belarus participated in ZAPAD in 2017. Similarly, China and Mongolia participated in VOSTOK-2018.

India-Russia

The Defence relations between India and Russia have been built on five major components such as defence, politics, civil nuclear energy, space and anti-terrorism cooperation. Lately, the economic component has been added between the defence relations of the countries. The countries have set to achieve a target of 30 billion USD of defence trade by 2025.

India is currently the second largest market for the Russian Defence industry. In 2017, around 68% of Indian military hardware imports came from Russia.

Russians consider India as one of their top five friends along with China, Belarus, Syria and Kazakhstan.

Month: Current Affairs - December, 2020