In mid-2025, Moscow quietly offered New Delhi a proposal: co-develop a localized version of its T-14 Armata main battle tank, produce it in India, integrate Indian subsystems, and fold it into broader Indian force modernization plans. The suggestion has an obvious logic for both sides. Russia seeks to salvage some prestige and funding for a stalled program, and lock India into its defense-industrial fold. India seeks a deal that could fill an urgent capability gap, allow it to leapfrog India’s sluggish indigenous armored vehicle programs, and in the end, affirm Delhi’s right to choose – irrespective of its larger geopolitical balancing act and thickening ties to Washington.
The point is not that India is moving back to Moscow. The point is that in an age of multipolarity – in which India is pivoting, by most accounts, ever closer to the United States to balance China in the Indo-Pacific – New Delhi will still do what it believes is in its national interest, no matter what Washington thinks. And in this case, that means not ruling out Russian armor for military, industrial, and geopolitical reasons flowing from India’s enduring grand strategy of multialignment.
By way of background, it is important to point out that the T-14 is not just any tank. It is Russia’s flagship next-generation system, designed to restore Russian armor’s qualitative edge after decades of stopgap updates to Soviet Cold War-era designs. The biggest innovation is the unmanned turret, remotely controlled by a three-man crew capsule inside an armored “citadel” in the hull. This reduces crew exposure and maximizes survivability. Its main gun – a 125mm 2A82-1M smoothbore cannon – can fire a hybrid round of both high-velocity penetrators and guided missiles. The Afghanit active protection system layers radar, electronic jamming, and interceptor munitions to defeat incoming projectiles, while its Malachit reactive armor adds additional modular layers of protection. Throw in a 1,500 hp diesel engine and an advanced fire control system with thermal optics and automated gunner controls, and the T-14 – at least on paper – is a generational step above legacy platforms like the T-90 and T-72 main battle tanks (MBTs), which still form the backbone of both the Russian and Indian armored forces.
For all its promise, however, the T-14 has yet to deliver on the battlefield. Component shortages, cost overruns, and the crushing resource demands of the war in Ukraine have left its production numbers low. Available estimates suggest Russia has fielded fewer than 100 units in total, none of which seems to have been deployed in combat. It has played only a limited role in Ukraine so far, perhaps by design. Moscow has little interest in risking its most advanced system in an environment where even tanks far simpler, cheaper, and numerically more important are being picked off by drones and loitering munitions. The T-14 hovers, at least for now, in that limbo between ambition and delivery that defines so much of Moscow’s quest to modernize its armed forces. It’s too expensive to scale up, too advanced to cancel, and yet too symbolic to keep as nothing more than a paper program.
This is where India comes in. New Delhi’s own tank modernization programs have stalled. The T-72s are hopelessly outdated. The T-90s, assembled locally in India under Russian license, are beginning to show their age and vulnerability. The Arjun MBT, while a capable system in some respects, has proven ill-suited to deployment along India’s borders, particularly along the Line of Actual Control with China. The Future Ready Combat Vehicle program, in which India is developing or acquiring a next-generation tank, has gone through several false starts. Meanwhile, tensions with China have not fully subsided, and the demand for modern armor that can survive a drone-saturated battlefield, fight in extreme altitude, and integrate with new command-and-control systems has never been more acute.
India, in other words, needs a new tank. And the T-14, especially a modified, localized version, represents one way to fill that capability gap fast. But the military angle is only one part of the equation. For India, the industrial logic of the T-14 proposal is just as important. Co-development of the T-14, especially if it includes components built locally in India, affords the chance to acquire next-gen military tech, build domestic production capabilities, and dovetail it with its own larger push for defense indigenization under “Made in India” banners.
The Russians, unlike their Western counterparts, have always been far more open to letting India produce locally, share important subsystems, and modify their platforms to local needs. Russian flexibility has long been a defining feature of the Indo-Russian defense partnership since Cold War days.
And that, in turn, is why the national interest argument is no less strong for Russia. For Moscow, the T-14 is a program that has been struggling to eke out an existence on Russian funding alone. Involving a foreign partner, even one as complicated as India, offers a way to inject some desperately needed cash, accelerate production, and legitimize the project in the eyes of other countries. India, in this sense, is not just another buyer. India is a strategic partner with the means to co-produce, co-develop, and eventually even co-market the tank for potential secondary sales in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere in Africa. Russia knows that retaining India as a defense-industrial partner is crucial to its influence in the Global South and its larger effort to pivot away from European markets and toward a more transactional, multipolar foreign policy posture.
The geopolitical logic, in this case, is straightforward for both sides. For Russia, the T-14 offer to India is one way of hedging against international isolation. Even under Western sanctions, Russia can signal that major powers are still interested in working with Moscow – not as supplicants or receivers of unilateral charity, but as equals shaping the next generation of military equipment.
For India, the same offer represents an expression of strategic autonomy. Even as New Delhi has deepened its ties with Washington in recent years through arms sales, intelligence sharing, and Indo-Pacific military exercises, it has never taken orders, much less showed any interest in becoming a client state or junior partner. It still buys S-400s from Russia, co-produces BrahMos missiles with Russia, and has a sizable submarine fleet built in part on Soviet legacy designs. More than 60 percent of the current inventory in the Indian military traces its design origins to Soviet or Russian systems.
And even as India diversifies, it does so on its own terms and with its own strategic calculations in mind: Israel is selling India UAVs not to replace Russia’s systems, but to complement them. France, likewise, is selling Rafales not to replace Russian aircraft, but to fly alongside them. But the United States is selling P-8Is precisely to replace the long-retire Russian Tupolev Tu-142M aircraft. Multialignment, in this sense, is less an ideology than a practice, driven by realism and anchored in national interest.
Of course, there are risks. Western pressure will intensify. Any new deal with Moscow, even one that only involves co-development and not co-production, could well trigger sanctions under U.S. law. Indian planners will have to calculate whether the risk of deeper engagement in a signature Russian project is worth the diplomatic backlash. And even if the deal goes through, there are operational risks. The war in Ukraine has already exposed major weaknesses in Russia’s armored doctrine, and Indian planners will be dissecting that war as much for its failures as for its successes. Then, too, there are the perennial risks of cost overruns, delays, and bureaucratic coordination challenges that have long plagued Indo-Russian defense projects.
But these are not new risks. In many ways, this is exactly how India has operated in an international order that is in flux. It has lived with U.S. outrage over its Russian arms purchases before. It has weathered Russian flirtations with China and even Pakistan and not been able to abandon the relationship. What matters for India is not alignment; it is leverage. India is not picking sides. India is maximizing its options.
And the same is true, for that matter, for Russia. For Moscow, India is more than just a market. India is a potential proof of concept: A successful joint T-14 program would be one demonstration that Russia, despite its woes, can still offer advanced systems in partnership with serious players on the world stage. It would buy time for Russia’s defense sector to resuscitate, modernize, and reorient itself for a world no longer built around a single global hegemon. The same deal would allow Russia to translate its lingering military prestige into economic and diplomatic capital at a time when both are in short supply.
That is the deeper truth behind the T-14 proposal. It’s not really about a tank. It is about two powers charting their own way in a world that has already changed. Russia is a former superpower clawing back relevance one defense-industrial partnership at a time. And India is a rising power that is not willing to outsource its own strategic autonomy to any one supplier and instead seeks to find a way of pursuing its own national interest through a complex maze of shifting partnerships and rivalries. The battlefield of tomorrow will, of course, be shaped to a large extent by sensors, missiles, and drones. But it will also be shaped by next-generation tanks – and New Delhi knows this.
Whether or not India ultimately signs up for the T-14 program, of course, remains to be seen. The politics of the proposal still has to be worked through. There are technical details to be hammered out and procurement timelines to be juggled. And all of this has to take place in an environment in which India is drawing ever closer to the United States on issues far larger than the T-14. But the fact that India is considering the deal at all, even at this late hour, suggests that strategic autonomy, for now at least, is alive and well. For Russia, the mere act of making the offer is one signal that the world to come will see Russia less as a great power and more as a great enabler.
The T-14, in other words, may never become the signature centerpiece of India’s armored corps. It may well remain a Russian program with Indian components. But in that process, it can still become something far more important. It can still become a symbol of how multialignment really works. Not through formal alliances, not through ideological blocs, but through discreet, quiet, transactional deals that are interest-driven.
As the British statesman Lord Palmerston put it pithily back in the 1800s, states have “no eternal allies or perpetual enemies – only enduring interests.” And if the T-14 deal does go through, Russia and India will have demonstrated that they both understand Palmerston’s advice and know how to act accordingly.