Russia wants to expand economic ties with Pak: Envoy

Moscow has kept its defence cooperation with Islamabad at a minimum level, but wants to expand bilateral economic relations, said Denis Alipov, Russia’s envoy to New Delhi.

Alipov said that Russia would never do anything detrimental to India and that was why it maintained only a limited defence relationship with Pakistan. He said that Russia-Pakistan military cooperation was precisely focused on countering terrorism.

“But we want to expand our economic presence in Pakistan. We don’t feel like a weak Pakistan would be a better choice for the region, for India or for Afghanistan for that matter,” he said on Monday while speaking at an event in New Delhi.

Pakistan has spiralled into a deep economic crisis and was looking for support from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and other nations as well as the International Monetary Fund to come out of it. Moscow’s envoy to New Delhi later clarified in a tweet that he had meant that a destabilised Pakistan would not be in the interest of any country in the region.

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Russia has since long been the largest supplier of military hardware to India and has been maintaining a low-key relationship with Pakistan. But with the changes in the geopolitical landscape and New Delhi’s growing ties with Washington DC since the landmark India-US civil nuclear agreement of 2008, Moscow started responding to Islamabad’s overtures to improve bilateral relations.

They also started discussing the sale of Russian Mi-35 attack helicopters to Pakistan in 2014, and the delivery of the choppers purportedly began in 2018 although New Delhi had conveyed to Moscow its concerns over the deal.

Moscow also inked a defence cooperation agreement with Islamabad in November 2015 and the two nations had the first joint military drill in September-October, 2016 – just weeks after India signed the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement with the US.

The last annual exercise between the Russian Army and the Pakistan Army took place in November 2020. Russia in April 2021 pledged to provide more ‘special’ military equipment to Pakistan and hold more bilateral wargames both in the mountains as well as in the Arabian Sea.

New Delhi in the past alerted the international community that the funds provided to Pakistan to support its counterterrorism operations had in fact been used to finance export of terror to India.

Besides, the military hardware provided to Pakistan had also been used against India.

“So, our relations with that country (Pakistan) are self-sufficient, but we always bear in mind our relations with India and have them in the background when we look and speak about our relations with Pakistan,” Alipov said in response to a query on New Delhi’s concerns over growing engagement with Islamabad.