The deal takes on even more significance as it was just one part of 28 investment deals between Russia and India signed during the very recent visit of Putin himself to Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. These covered a broad range of subjects, including not just oil, gas, and petrochemicals, steel, and shipbuilding, but also military matters.
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The scope and scale of this coup by Putin in India is as dramatic as it is unexpected, and runs contrary to the US's expectations of how well its contra-China/Russia strategy in the Middle East had been going. The US fightback against China's expansion of influence in the Middle East was founded principally upon the `relationship normalisation' deals that have been made with the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel, and on India's role as a counterbalance to China in Asia and as a major global buyer of oil and gas, as analysed in depth in my new book on the global oil markets.
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Until China dramatically upped the tempo of this OBOR-related policy - at around the same time as the US signalled its lack of interest in continuing its own large-scale activities in the Middle East through its withdrawal from the Iran `nuclear deal' and its withdrawal from much of Syria - India had stuck to a policy of trying to contain China. With the announcement in August 2020 of the US-brokered Israel-UAE `normalisation deal' it appeared that a new corridor of co-operation was being developed from the US (and Israel), through the UAE (and Kuwait, Bahrain and in part Saudi Arabia) through to India. As much of China's current turbo-driven expansion into the Middle East is predicated in the first instance on the energy sector, the starting point for the build-out of the US-Israel-UAE-India also appeared to be the energy sector.