Results of the 23rd annual Russia-India summit in New Delhi outlined a plan to increase mutual trade to $100 billion by 2030. At the end of this year trade is expected to remain roughly on par with last year – approximately $65 billion. How can Belarus increase trade with India? Yuri Yarmolinsky, an analyst at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Research (BISR) and head of the SCO and BRICS Research Center, shared his opinion on this matter.
Judging from the rhetoric of the leaders, the analyst assumed that Indians will continue to purchase Russian oil even through more complex indirect routes despite the threat of secondary sanctions from the United States of America, demonstrating strategic autonomy and commitment to partnership with Russia. “Obviously Narendra Modi believes that India’s economic power and weight in world affairs give it the freedom to raise stakes. The pause surrounding the future import of Russian oil, the need to correct the trade imbalance, and the USA’s tariffs allow New Delhi to increase its export to the Russian Federation many times over, especially in agriculture, pharmaceutics, mechanical engineering, and electronics. Small and medium-sized companies are expected to play a key role in diversifying the trade basket,” noted Yuri Yarmolinsky.
What analogies arise and what conclusions can be drawn in the context of the Belarusian-Indian agenda? “In November 2025 at a meeting with Indian Ambassador Ashok Kumar, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko also set a new target for mutual trade with India at $2-3 billion per year. It means that with its long-standing peak of about $600 million and the dominance of potash fertilizers in the structure of Belarusian export (up to 80% in some years), it will be necessary to secure a 3.5-5-fold increase,” the analyst noted.
According to the expert, the seriousness and ambition of the task at hand makes results of the 23rd Russian-Indian summit kind of “a guidebook” for Belarus in terms of studying (and possibly borrowing) common approaches, synchronizing priorities, the ability to adapt, and a more sensitive attitude to problems and requests of partners, including the terms and limits of reciprocal market access. “Surely, upon closer examination, the Russian-Indian agenda will reveal niches for integrating Belarus’ interests, for example, in investment projects in the Far East and the Arctic,” Yuri Yarmolinsky emphasized.
At the same time, a massive increase in trade turnover with India, given its current baseline and dependence on raw materials, will require the development of a non-trivial and non-linear strategy, which should be based on answers to a number of important questions from the start. “It is necessary to understand whether the Belarusian manufacturing sector is capable and ready to physically increase and adapt the volume of export products to specific, including peculiar, needs of the Indian market. And this is despite the fact that some experts say that there is no such thing as the ‘Indian market’, but rather markets in individual regions of the country,” the expert noted.
Furthermore, according to the analyst, it is necessary to determine how deep our knowledge is about peculiar preferences of different categories of Indian consumers.
“Then we need to find out to what extent our industrial products are in demand and competitive in India today, and which ones exactly. We also need to understand whether Belarusian small and medium-sized businesses have the demand and resources to trade more actively with India and invest in this country. In addition, it is important to know which Indian imports are most interesting to Belarus, in what volumes, and to what extent we are ready to open the market,” he stressed.
“It is obvious that the task set by the president can only be accomplished by consolidating the joint efforts of the state, export enterprises, specialized export promotion agencies, the banking sector, logistics operators, private businesses, and the expert community,” Yuri Yarmolinsky concluded.
Follow us on:
