In the mid-2024, India was buying more than 2 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil, some 43-44% of its imports, from Russia. In August 2025, the US imposed 25% additional tariffs on India for buying Russian crude and thereafter Indian refiners began ‘diversifying’. Between December 2025-February 2026, volumes purchased declined to 1-1.2 million bpd amounting to less than 25 % of imports.Then, the US suddenly decided India could again buy Russian oil. Indian refiners moved swiftly, sharply ramping up purchases of discounted Russian crude. They bought 30 million barrels in the first fortnight of March alone. For April they booked 60 million barrels. Incidentally, they are now paying premiums of $5-$15 per barrel where they earlier were getting discounts.The 30-day waiver expired on April 11 and the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent declared there would be no waiver. But better sense prevailed, and two days later the waiver was extended for another month, driven by fears of supply shortages and price spikes. Minus the waiver, India would have found itself in a classic energy bind – squeezed between a US waiver that had lapsed and a Strait of Hormuz that remains contested.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The US veto on when India can, or cannot, buy energy from Russia or Iran seems to now have been embedded into India’s energy policy. Even as it has tilted towards Washington in its current West Asia crisis, India is finding that US policies work to its detriment, especially when it comes to energy security.Actually, the current developments, driven by the economic shockwaves of the West Asian conflict, have handed India an opportunity to quietly revive the relationship with Russia and restate its strategic autonomy. No one really planned this, but it would be strategic folly not to exploit it.The opportunity seems to go well beyond oil. For years, New Delhi cowered beneath the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) 2017 that threatened US sanctions on any “significant transactions” on the defence procurement front from Russia. That threat helped delay, though never derail, the $5.43 billion S-400 air defence deal signed in 2018. Russia is now completing the original five-regiment S-400 contract: the fourth squadron is due in May-June 2026, the fifth by November.Emboldened by West Asian developments, New Delhi has moved decisively. In February 2026, the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) cleared the purchase of 288 additional S-400 missiles at a cost of roughly $1.1 billion, to replenish stocks depleted during Sindoor. On March 3, India signed a Rs 2,812 crore ($236-238 million) deal for vertical-launch Shtil missiles for the Indian Navy. Then, in late March 2026, the DAC approved a Rs 2.38 trillion ($25 billion) defence package that included five additional S-400 systems worth approximately $6.1 billion as well as one worth Rs 858 crore ($100 million) for the Tunguska air defence missile system.In ordinary times, these moves would have invited diplomatic pressure from Washington. These are not ordinary times. The US is deeply preoccupied in West Asia, its sanctions architecture is under strain, and it needs Indian cooperation too much to force a confrontation.Against this backdrop of defence assertiveness stands a troubling pattern of political capitulation. India’s strategic autonomy – the foundational doctrine of its foreign policy, tested through the Cold War and refined through the post-unipolar era – has visibly frayed.For years, India has navigated the US-Russia rivalry while avoiding direct confrontation with either power. But in recent times, the tight-rope walking has become difficult and India began wobbling on its perch. It began with having to give up the purchase of Iranian oil in 2019 which was followed by the decision, announced by Trump in February last year to stop buying Russian oil. Indeed, Trump claimed that India had agreed to now buy oil from Venezuela and the US, a characterisation New Delhi did not forcefully rebut. In September 2025, the US revoked a waiver on sanctions on India’s operation of Chabahar port in Iran.The West Asia war has brought the contradiction into sharper relief. When the US and Israel struck Iran, India did not condemn the attacks – attacks that most of the international community regarded as a violation of sovereignty. More gravely, India refused to condemn the assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. When prime minister Modi spoke with President Trump on April 14, he emphasised keeping the Strait of Hormuz “open and secure” – language that pointedly avoided any criticism of the US naval blockade that had created the crisis in the first place.The Diplomat has noted that India’s silence on the Iran war directly inverts the logic that guided its 2022 refusal to join sanctions against Russia. Then, New Delhi calculated that preserving Russia as an independent actor would sustain multipolarity – precisely the condition that protects Indian strategic space. Now, by allowing the US to potentially degrade Iranian capabilities and consolidate power in West Asia, India is undermining the multipolar architecture it claims to champion.The Russia relationshipIndia’s relationship with Russia is a legacy asset – rooted in decades of defence dependency and Cold War-era goodwill. The current moment reinforces its material value. The S-400’s performance during Operation Sindoor as well as that of the Indo-Russian Brahmos contributed to India’s fine performance.But the defence relationship runs deeper. India and Russia are tied together by the range of license-produced systems India fields – Su-30MKI fighters, T-90 tanks, warships and so on. Moscow has been key to our nuclear propelled submarine project. While the assistance for the INS Arihant, India’s nuclear propelled ballistic missile submarine dates from the 1980s, Russia continues to be involved in India’s nuclear propelled submarine project as well as in some aspects of our missile programme.Russia is also assisting India in its manned space flight programme and is offering India unprecedented access to the technology of its S-57 5gth generation fighter programme. Recently the two countries signed up on a reciprocal exchange of logistics agreement (RELOS) formalised in 2025 that allows them to station 3,000 troops and warships and aircraft in each other’s territory for a limited period of time.Beyond the defence area, what the American veto has been doing is to restrict India’s options in relation to its continental aspirations as a major Asian power. The reason is that this is linked to the Iran relationship, another area where Washington’s baleful eye has prevented the development of fruitful relations. The European sanctions on Russia had finally persuaded Moscow to look southwards towards Iran and India for economic ties by exploiting the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), but the US, pursuing Israel’s interests in West Asia, has blocked India in Iran and, by extension, Russia and Central Asia.The shape of the US relationshipTo understand the challenge India must now confront, one has to understand what the US relationship actually involves – both its genuine value and its structural tensions.On the positive side, the relationship is substantively deep. It has given India geopolitical heft and helped enhance its ties with US allies in East Asia and the Persian Gulf. Over the last two decades, India has procured nearly $20 billion worth of US-origin military hardware, ranging from C-17 Globemaster and C-130J aircraft to Apache helicopters and M777 howitzers. India has signed several foundational agreements on closer cooperation with the US that also involves some intelligence sharing.The two countries have broadly aligned geopolitical interests, technology transfer arrangements and supply chain partnerships that Washington values as a counterweight to China. Yet the relationship is also structurally unequal in ways that India must confront honestly. The US has repeatedly used, or threatened to use, legislative instruments – CAATSA, tariffs, secondary sanctions – as tools of coercion against Indian sovereign decisions. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said bluntly that Indian decisions – like defence purchases from Russia and participation in BRICS – have “rubbed the United States the wrong way.”There is little doubt that the US relationship provides India geopolitical heft but, the current war should educate us on the limits to the benefits the Americans offer. Indeed, even as the war raged in West Asia, a US official Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of State made it clear during an engagement in New Delhi that the US would limit certain kinds of economic cooperation with India to avoid repeating their “mistake” in enabling the rise of China.Drawing red linesWhat India needs now is not louder rhetoric, but clearer doctrine. New Delhi must communicate to Washington that certain categories of decision – energy sourcing, defence procurement, and bilateral relationships with third countries – fall within India’s sovereign prerogative and are not subject to extraterritorial legislation. This is not anti-Americanism. It is the basic grammar of sovereign equality that every serious power insists upon.The way out of the US squeeze is not balance – it is clarity. India must tell Washington what it will and will not accept, and then hold that line regardless of the short-term pressure.Washington is not in a position to press hard right now. It needs Indian cooperation across the Indo-Pacific, in supply chain restructuring, in technology partnerships, and in the broader effort to shape a multipolar order that does not simply cede space to China. The US has even suggested India play a mediating role in the Iran conflict – an acknowledgement of Indian strategic weight that New Delhi should leverage, not squander through reflexive deference.The same clarity is required with Moscow. India’s Russia relationship is a legacy asset of enormous value. But legacy alone is not strategy. New Delhi must be explicit about what it expects from the partnership – in technology transfer, in supply chain resilience, in timely delivery of contracted systems — and be willing to hold that line.The architecture of autonomyStrategic autonomy cannot rest on borrowed luck or tactical manoeuvre. It must rest on articulated principle – and on the domestic capacities that reduce vulnerability to external pressure over time. This means accelerating defence manufacturing under the Atmanirbhar Bharat framework, so that India’s security posture is not perpetually hostage to foreign supply chains. It means building strategic petroleum reserves beyond the current 5.3 million metric tonnes. It means completing the INSTC infrastructure that links India to Russia and Central Asia through Iran – and refusing to abandon Chabahar as an American concession.India’s foreign policy has long spoken the language of strategic autonomy. The current moment demands that it be exercised, not merely declared. The conditions that have opened this window – a US distracted by West Asia, its sanctions architecture under strain, Indian leverage quietly elevated – will not persist indefinitely. What we have may not quite amount to a geopolitical windfall, but it is certainly a major opportunity to work up the nerve to state our interests plainly.The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.