The Indian Air Force Command stated that russian military-industrial complex will apparently not be able to make a major delivery in the interests of Delhi this year due to Western sanctions, although Rosoboronexport denied everything in a comment to Reuters journalists.
In fact, there are two possible options: either the supply of components for the Su-30MKI and MiG-29K fighters, or the supply of two more regimental sets of the S-400 complexes out of five that have been signed.
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If these are aircraft components, then russians themselves have an interest in making the life harder for India, making out a fictitious reason. Especially against the background of how the Indian military industry began to promote the domestic Tejas fighter in foreign markets as a replacement for the MiG-29 or even the MiG-35. But if the question is about the S-400 SAM supply for India, then the situation may turn out to be more ambiguous.
Let's start with the fact that while producing these air defense systems, the russian military-industrial complex could depend on supplies from the West not only in terms of components, but also in terms of software for production equipment.
For example, in October 2022, the Western media reported that the American Extreme Networks sold its software and equipment to the Avangard Moscow Machine-Building Plant, which is a manufacturer of the 48N6 anti-aircraft missiles for the S-400 air defense systems, bypassing Western sanctions, during 2017-2021.
The plant bought, in particular, switches and "software blocks", the delivery was made under the guise of equipment for the production of freight cars. It is especially interesting that Extreme Networks assured its russian partners that their software does not require third-party updates, so the software will work under any conditions.
There is no available data whether the equipment and software by Extreme Networks is currently used for the production of the 48N6 anti-aircraft missiles, which were used to shell Kyiv in January 2023. But instead, we can read another interesting thing about the production of russia’s S-400 under the conditions of Western sanctions.
According to The Wall Street Journal, in October 2022 the Chinese China Taly Aviation Technologies Corp. from the structure of the Equipment Department of the Air Force of China supplied russian Almaz-Antey enterprise with elements for the production of the 96L6E radar station, which is part of the S-400 complex. From this data we can make an assumption that if the supply from Western countries of important components for the production of air defense systems of this type is blocked, then the russians substituted necessary components at the expense of supplies from state-owned companies of the People's Republic of China.
How wide such import substitution really was, there is still no data to assess. But Defense Express assumes that the real cause of the problems with the delivery of the S-400 to India could be the "wishes" of China, which does not want its adversary to be strengthened at the expense of russian weapons. And who now has all the leverage to do so.
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