General Dhiraj Seth begins the first Indian Army chief visit to Russia in eight years

General Dhiraj Seth, Chief of the Army Staff, began a three-day official visit to Russia on 16 September, the first by an Indian Army chief since General Bipin Rawat travelled there in October 2018. The Defence Ministry said the trip runs through 18 September and is meant to deepen army-to-army ties and the wider defence partnership.

In Moscow he will take a guard of honour and lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He will meet Colonel General Andrei Nikolayevich Mordvichev, commander-in-chief of the Russian Land Forces, on training and professional military cooperation. He will visit the National Defence Control Centre and sit with Vasily Sergeyevich Osmakov, the deputy defence minister who handles industry and procurement. In Saint Petersburg he will visit the Mikhailovskaya Military Artillery Academy and meet its faculty.

Indian reporting on the visit has been more specific than the ministry's communique. The Tribune said discussions on upgrades of Russian-origin systems and on spare parts are expected on the agenda. That is the operational reason for sending an Army chief rather than a protocol delegation. Large parts of India's tank, air-defence, aviation and artillery inventory still come from Russian design bureaus. War in Ukraine has stretched those factories and the pipelines that feed them. Spares that once arrived on a predictable calendar now need political attention.

A Stockholm International Peace Research Institute report published in March said Russia was India's top supplier of military hardware in 2021-25. That ranking is a lagging number. New contracts have shifted toward other vendors. The fleet that already exists has not. T-90s, SMERCH, Igla, Konkurs, and older air-defence guns do not become French or American because a communique prefers diversity. They need parts.

Why eight years elapsed

Rawat's 2018 trip sat in a different war. Since then India has fought a border crisis with China, bought more from the United States, France and Israel, and watched Russia become a combatant whose industry is committed to its own front. Army chiefs still visit Washington, Paris and Tel Aviv. Moscow dropped down the travel list. Putting Seth on a plane in September 2026 is a decision to keep the maintenance relationship alive while New Delhi also runs Yudh Abhyas with the United States in Uttarakhand and Rajasthan.

Osmakov is the meeting that will be judged later. He is the man who can talk production slots and export licences. Mordvichev is the man who can talk doctrine and training. The artillery academy in Saint Petersburg is a gesture to a branch that still uses Russian tubes and fire-control ideas. None of those sessions will be public. The test will be whether spare-part lead times shorten in the next two quarters.

The parallel American exercise

Yudh Abhyas 2026 is already under way at Mahajan and at Auli, about 95 kilometres from the Line of Actual Control, with U.S. counter-drone vehicles on Indian ranges for the first time. Seth's Moscow week sits beside that fact without cancelling it. India has spent a decade saying it will not choose a camp. An Army chief in Russia in the same month that American HIMARS and M-LIDS are on Indian soil is that sentence in travel form.

The ministry's closing line was the usual one: sustained military diplomacy, enduring defence relationship. The enduring part is the inventory. The diplomacy is the attempt to keep that inventory shootable while the supplier is in a war of its own.