Putin has done it again. Prime Minister Modi will visit Moscow as his first overseas destination since his re-election. And Modi has again demonstrated that India pursues an independent foreign policy. While this visit will come as a shock to Western policy makers. It also strikes a blow at efforts to isolate Russia internationally, while China will also be concerned.

Much of Australia’s strategic thinking is like being wrapped up on a cold tempestuous night, under a soft blanket, in front of comfortably warm embers: Russia is evil, China is bad, India is good, and the US is the sturdy reliable groundsman protecting us from the prowling wolves.

This simple narrative extends to Russia and China forming an axis of autocracies arrayed against the liberal US-led order, under whose wing Australia is snuggly tucked. NATO must therefore confront a single strategic theatre which now includes Asia.The fading President Biden has cast it as a contest between democracy and autocracy. Could the world be so simple?

Some years ago, as things were souring with China’s authoritarian one-party state, it was hoped by Canberra’s policy makers that democratic India would emerge as a power to balance China and keep the wolves away from our door.

The unedifying spectacle of Prime Minister Albanese’s excessively frothy embrace of Modi in Sydney and at the Modi Stadium in Gujarat, thereby implicitly endorsing Modi’s re-election campaign, said it all. And at the time our Prime Minister was gushing over him, Modi’s death squads were targeting Sikh separatist leaders in Canada and the US. We haven’t been told whether Australia has received a visit.

On any measure, India has disappointed. The test came with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. India, like China, did not criticise the invasion, did not join Western sanctions but continued to import Russian crude oil in ever greater quantities taking advantage of low prices; and to buy Russian arms and military equipment.

And, like Xi Jinping, soon after he was appointed China’s President, Modi’s first trip will be to catch up with his ‘old friend’ Vladimir. It was never meant to be this way. India was to be in the corner of the democracies in the contest with the autocracies.

Beijing will also cast a leery eye over this visit and the symbolism of its timing so soon after Modi’s re-election. This is especially so as it comes after Putin’s recent visits to Pyongyang and Hanoi.

With Modi’s visit to Moscow, Putin will have met, in quick succession, with the leaders of three of China’s bordering states with which Beijing has complex and difficult relations. The message Putin is sending to Beijing is clear: Russia has strategic options in Asia, other than China.

Putin and Xi share a sour attitude towards the liberal West, and an especially deep resentment against, what they regard, as a proselytising and often hypocritical US. They also have a shared interest in the survival of each other’s authoritarian regimes.

But Russia has emerged as the junior partner to China in Eurasia. The long-run trend driven by vastly different economic performance has been accelerated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This has depleted Russia’s military and diverted resources from the east to the western front.

Even Russia’s erstwhile former allies in Central Asia have refused to support the invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, China continues to increase its influence and attractiveness in Russia’s former sphere of influence.

China has also broken with an international understanding and formally recognised the Taliban regime in Kabul. Afghanistan and China’s involvement in it will be a topic of high importance when Modi and Putin meet.

Another topic for discussion, that has already been flagged publicly, is Russia-India cooperation in Russia’s Far East. A feature of this has been the Vladivostok-Chennai Corridor. This was first announced in 2019 during Modi’s visit to Vladivostok.

While still largely symbolic, it is part of Putin’s agenda to, at least be seen domestically, as trying to balance China in the Far East. The Corridor, however, would have Indian ships transiting through the South China Sea and Sea of Japan. If trade were to develop substantially, it would have geostrategic implications for India’s presence in the waters of East Asia. Putin has also managed to attract Indian investment into some shipbuilding facilities in Vladivostok.

The Far East is particularly sensitive for Russia-China relations, where Russians fear that the resource-rich, but sparsely populated and developed, region could be colonised by China.

Some one million hectares of this area, including the major cities of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, were ceded by the ailing Qing Dynasty to Imperial Russia in the Treaty of Peking (1860). Of all the former imperial powers which carved off pieces of China under the nineteenth century ‘unequal treaties’, Russia is the only one not to have returned any territory at all, let alone the lot.

While Xi and Putin with their ‘friendship without limits’ statement of 2022, of which we hear nothing these days, have tried to declare that all historical differences have been set aside, China’s nationalists have not forgotten the lost lands of Manchuria. As recently as April 2023, Beijing declared that all China’s official maps had to use the former Chinese names, including for Vladivostok, from before 1860.

In 1969, the Soviet Union and China fought a series of short but intense skirmishes over disputed islands in the Ussuri River in Manchuria. Russia’s embrace of India also has a fraught history for China. In the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, Moscow sided with ‘capitalist’ New Delhi, against its fraternal communist ally in Beijing. Memories run deep; whatever China’s contemporary leadership may seek to wish away.

The Chussia Anxiety, of a China-Russia united front against the West, is another prowling wolf like the China Threat. Their antecedents can be found in nineteenth-century Britain’s Great Game of strategic contest with Russia in Central Asia. Russia never had designs on British India as feared. When strategic policy is based on complex reality, understanding of history, interests and actual capacities, these phantom wolves disappear into the night.

Republished from AFR, July 9, 2024