New Delhi: Few defence exports have attracted as much attention at home and abroad – or embodied as many geopolitical contradictions – as India’s BrahMos supersonic cruise missile. The Philippines has already acquired it, Indonesia has recently followed suit, and Vietnam is, according to Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials, poised to become BrahMos’s next export customer. Beyond these countries, more than a dozen others, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, South Africa and Malaysia, have all expressed interest in acquiring the BrahMos, underscoring its emergence as India’s flagship defence export and one of the world’s few commercially available supersonic cruise missiles.Designed primarily for anti-ship and precision land-attack missions, the BrahMos is a two-stage missile system developed, produced and marketed by BrahMos Aerospace, an Indo-Russian joint venture based in New Delhi and named after India’s Brahmaputra and Russia’s Moskva rivers.Capable of speeds of up to Mach 2.8–3.0 – nearly three times faster than most subsonic cruise missiles – the BrahMos has, depending on the variant, a range extending from 290 km to over 450 km and carries a conventional warhead of around 200–300 kg. It is guided by an advanced inertial navigation system augmented by satellite navigation and an active radar seeker in the terminal phase, providing a low circular error probable (CEP). Its high-speed, low-altitude, sea-skimming flight profile and terminal manoeuvrability make it extremely difficult to detect, track and intercept.Also read: The Indian Military’s Inventory is Bewilderingly Diverse – and Increasingly Hard to SustainThe missile can be launched from land, sea, air, and submarine platforms, making it one of the world’s most versatile and survivable precision-strike systems.Supporting these capabilities is an equally impressive domestic manufacturing ecosystem, centred on BrahMos Aerospace facilities in Hyderabad and Nagpur and supported by specialised production units in Thiruvananthapuram, Pilani and the dedicated BrahMos production and integration complex commissioned in Lucknow in May 2025.The Lucknow facility significantly expands manufacturing capacity, with a planned capability to produce 80–100 BrahMos missiles annually and provision for manufacturing up to 100–150 next-generation variants in the future. This expanding industrial base, involving more than 200 Indian companies supplying components for BrahMos, provides the scale and flexibility required to support both the Indian armed forces and a growing export market. But behind every export contract of the current 290-km BrahMos variant lies an intricate strategic, diplomatic and commercial conundrum – a geopolitical jalebi of intertwined interests, shared ownership, competing alliances and conflicting national objectives that is far more complex than the missile itself. Each overseas deal also prompts a series of questions that are rarely asked and hardly ever fully answered.A Mobile Autonomous Launcher carrying BrahMos missile proceeds during rain-affected full-dress rehearsal for the Republic Day Parade, in New Delhi on January 23, 2026. Photo: PTI/Kamal Kishore.Who actually owns the missile’s intellectual property rights (IPR)? Does Russia also share in the financial returns from every overseas sale? And, perhaps more intriguingly, does Moscow retain an effective veto over where it can be exported? If so, why has the Kremlin repeatedly approved exports of a jointly developed missile of such advanced capability to countries like the Philippines, Indonesia and potentially Vietnam? These South-East Asian countries are acquiring BrahMos principally to deter China’s maritime hegemony, even as Moscow and Beijing proclaim an increasingly close strategic and political partnership.The answers – where they exist at all – are fragmentary, obscured by official secrecy and the classified nature of the BrahMos Programme. Yet, taken together, they reveal that BrahMos is not merely India’s most successful defence export, but the product of one of the world’s most unusual defence-industrial partnerships, where technology, IPR, commercial interests and geopolitics are so tightly interwoven that every exported missile carries implications far beyond the battlefield.The first clue lies in the ownership of BrahMos Aerospace itself.Established under a 1998 Indo-Russian intergovernmental agreement, the company is majority-owned by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), which holds a 50.5% stake, while Russia’s NPO Mashinostroyenia owns the remaining 49.5%. This unique corporate and technological structure gives Moscow an enduring stake in the missile’s development and export.In February 2015, former BrahMos Aerospace chief executive S.K. Mishra had stated in an interview with an in-house publication that the missile’s IPR was jointly owned by DRDO and NPO Mashinostroyenia, making India not merely the missile systems licensed manufacturer, but a co-developer, majority shareholder and co-owner. The precise allocation of the missile patents, design rights and proprietary technologies, however, has never been publicly disclosed. Nor has either government released the detailed joint venture agreement or the legal mechanism governing its exports. Periodic official statements, nevertheless, indicate that BrahMos sales have never been unilateral Indian decisions. In a written reply to parliament in 2010, then defence minister A.K. Antony had stated that in consultation with the Russian government, India would export BrahMos to ‘friendly countries’, reaffirming that overseas sales would proceed only with bilateral concurrence. Subsequent administrations in Delhi have adhered to the same approach, with BrahMos exports supposedly continuing to require bilateral concurrence between India and Russia.Equally significant is what Russia has never done with regard to BrahMos. Despite owning 49.5% of BrahMos Aerospace and contributing many of the missile’s foundational technologies, Moscow has neither independently exported the missile nor, as far as is publicly known, sought to market it on its own. Every overseas sale has instead been undertaken through the Indo-Russian joint venture, reinforcing that BrahMos is a genuinely shared enterprise rather than simply a Russian missile marketed by India.This unique ownership structure has enabled Delhi – not Moscow – to become the international face of BrahMos exports, even as Russia remains the indispensable, if largely unseen, partner behind every sale.That persistent partnership rests on Moscow’s deep technological and commercial stake in the programme. NPO Mashinostroyenia has provided the missile’s core technology, drawing on its P-800 Oniks/Yakhont supersonic cruise missile and decades of expertise in ramjet propulsion and supersonic missile design. Working alongside Russian scientists and technicians, DRDO had, over the years, developed BrahMos’s navigation systems, mission software, launcher technology, fire-control architecture and platform integration that transformed it into a distinct Indo-Russian weapon system.Presently, the DRDO claims BrahMos has achieved around 83% indigenous content.But this should not be mistaken for complete technological independence, as Russia continues to provide some of the programme’s most sophisticated technologies, notably elements of the ramjet propulsion system that powers sustained supersonic flight at nearly Mach 3, together with specialised materials capable of withstanding the extreme thermal and structural stresses generated during flight. In other words, although India now independently manufactures the overwhelming majority of the missile, some of its most critical technologies remain rooted in the original partnership between Delhi and Moscow.Full scale model of BrahMos air-launched cruise missile. Photo: brahmos.com.Consequently, Russia’s stake in BrahMos is both technological and economic. However, Moscow’s financial benefits do not appear to arise from royalties on individual missile exports, and there is no publicly available evidence that India pays Russia a royalty on each exported BrahMos. Instead, export earnings flow to BrahMos Aerospace, from where NPO Mashinostroyenia benefits through its 49.5% ownership stake in the joint venture.The first test of this unusual collaborative arrangement came in January 2022, when the Philippines signed a US$374.96 million contract for three shore-based coastal defence missile batteries for its Marine Corps’ Coastal Defence Regiment. Two batteries have since been delivered, with the third due shortly, making the Philippines the first foreign operator of the BrahMos system. Manila intends to deploy the missile to bolster coastal defences against increasingly assertive Chinese naval and coast guard activity in the South China Sea.This sale was followed up earlier this month by securing an even larger BrahMos package with Indonesia, during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Jakarta. The two sides concluded an agreement, reportedly worth around US$630 million, for BrahMos missiles and India’s indigenously developed Astra beyond-visual-range-air-to-air-missile (BVRAAM) for integration onto the Indonesian Air Force’s Russian-origin Sukhoi Su-30MK2 fighters. For Jakarta, the BrahMos acquisition strengthens deterrence around its Natuna Islands, where China’s expansive maritime claims overlap with Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone.Vietnam, meanwhile, remains the most strategically significant prospective customer. Hanoi has pursued the BrahMos acquisition for well over a decade as a means of strengthening its anti-access capability against the Chinese Navy in the South China Sea and surrounding disputed waters. And though negotiations for the missile have reportedly advanced considerably with Hanoi, no formal contract has yet been announced.But once concluded, the Vietnam deal would, in effect, mean India had supplied its premier cruise missile to three Southeast Asian states that collectively form a strategic arc stretching across China’s maritime periphery – from the South China Sea to the approaches of the Malacca Strait. That, in turn, prompts a larger and more pertinent question: why would Russia facilitate such exports when Beijing has emerged in recent years as its closest strategic partner?According to Indian and overseas defence analysts, the answer lies in Moscow’s transactional approach to arms exports. While the US often uses defence sales to build military interoperability, bind allies and reinforce security partnerships, Russia has long viewed arms exports more pragmatically, treating them as instruments of revenue, influence and strategic leverage. Its priority is not necessarily to arm only friendly states, but to retain influence through defence relationships – even when buyers have security concerns involving Russia’s own partners like China, in this instance.Also read: With BrahMos Deal, India Deepens Defence Ties as Indonesia Preserves Its Strategic BalanceAs US-based Carnegie Endowment analysts Eugene Rumer and Richard Sokolsky observed in their September 2022 analysis, Moscow has long pursued this strategy through “sales of more advanced weapons systems” and a “steadfast refusal to take sides on the issues that divide China and India.” Moreover, Russia has supplied Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and S-400 Triumf air-defence missiles to China while simultaneously providing India with the same air-defence capability, along with Sukhoi Su-30MKIs, tanks, frigates, submarines and a wide range of other advanced military equipment. Moscow has also continued to support India’s long-standing indigenous nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) programme, an important component of Delhi’s nuclear deterrent vis-à-vis China. Against this backdrop, BrahMos exports represent not a departure from Russian policy but a continuation of Moscow’s decades-old practice of separating defence commerce from alliance politics.Facilitating BrahMos exports also serves Russia’s own interests, as India remains one of Moscow’s largest and most steadfast defence partners despite Delhi’s increasing arms purchases from France, Israel and the United States. Built over more than six decades of military cooperation, the relationship has made India one of the few remaining large-scale markets for Russian materiel. Hence, India is a defence customer Russia cannot afford to lose, making preservation of this partnership as much a strategic imperative as a commercial one.Furthermore, blocking BrahMos exports to countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam would not only undermine one of the few genuinely successful Indo-Russian defence-industrial collaborations, but could also accelerate India’s search for indigenous or Western alternatives – ultimately at Russia’s expense.For more than six decades of importing and licence-producing Soviet and later Russian military hardware, India had never exported a weapon system incorporating Russian technology. BrahMos broke that precedent. Yet, despite its commercial success and the government’s rhetoric of Atmanirbhar Bharat, the missile still carries an unmistakable Russian imprint – one that is likely to remain for years to come.