US can't deter our defence ties : Russia's envoy

Moscow on Thursday said that its defence cooperation with New Delhi would not be deterred by United States sanctions and Russia would soon clinch more deals with India, including the ones for supplying frigates and Kalashnikov rifles.

Nikolay Kudashev, Moscow's envoy to New Delhi, said that the US would not be able to put pressure on Russia and India.

His comment came a day after American President Donald Trump said in Washington D.C. that New Delhi would soon find out if the US would impose sanctions on India for clinching a Rs 39,000 crore deal to buy five S-400 air defence weapon systems from Russia.

He also said that the two countries would ink within the next few months two more big-ticket deals – one for Russia to supply four advanced warships to India and another for India to buy AK-103 rifles from JSC Kalashnikov Concern of Russia.

The US Congress in July 2017 passed the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) to impose sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. Trump signed it into law in August 2017 and its scope was further expanded in October 2017. The Section 231 of the CAATSA mandated secondary sanctions to any nation entering into high-value deals to procure military hardware from Russia.

During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi last week, India inked the deal to buy the S-400 Triumf long-range surface-to-air missile systems from Almaz-Antey Corporation of Russia, although it could make its entities vulnerable to sanctions under Section 231 of the CAATSA.

New Delhi has been asking Washington D.C. to make it sure that its entities does not become liable for action under the CAATSA, once it clinches the S-400 deal with Moscow. The US, however, remained non-committal.

New Delhi conveyed to Washington that India could not abruptly scale down its reliance on military hardware from Russia, given the decades-old history of defence cooperation between the two countries.