Any decision that India takes on which of the two fighter jets between the American F-35 and the Sukhoi Su-57 it would go with is a decision for India alone and no one else including Russia has any say in it, according to Russian Ambassador to India Denis Alipov.
He made the comments at the NDTV Defence Summit in a session titled ‘The Next Chapter of India-Russia Defence Ties’. “The US is welcome to promote its product. It’s a good aircraft, no doubt about that. But way too expensive. If India goes for that, well, that would be India’s sovereign decision. But we are offering a much better deal. The Russian ambassador pointed out that “trust and respect are the very qualities that characterise our (India-Russia) relationship. “You don’t do business with untrustworthy partners. And it has been, as minister Jaishankar once pointed out, remarkably consistent. “Throughout all these decades, we have been friends who have been reliable partners to each other – not only Russia to India, but both ways. We have never conditioned our relations on any immediate global disposition, so we have never regarded our relationship as a zero-sum game.
Since the times of the Soviet Union, since India’s independence – next year we’re going to celebrate 80 years of our diplomatic relations,” he said, referring to India’s massive defence purchases over the last several decades including iconic legacy hardware like the MiG-21 and the MiG-29.
Next year we are going to see hopefully many firsts at the Bengaluru air show,” Alipov said. I think this consistency, the assistance and help to each other throughout the years, has made a very solid foundation for our relations to go further with wide perspectives,” Alipov said.
