Of course, they must have factored in the fact that we will be bothered, but they calculated that their interests were better served by taking the calculated risk of offending India and going ahead with the exercise. After all, even we didn't accede completely to their demands on Crimea and although we didn't go the whole hog in opposing them, we did stop short of accepting Russia's position completely, plus there's the issue of weapon sales going to US instead of Russia.
What??
Our position on Crimea does not endanger Russian national security. Additionally it is not a reversal of positions, i.e. we did not initially declare Crimea as Russian and then declare it non-Russian.
India telling Russia to amend their position on Pakistan will be equivalent to Russia telling us to reverse our position on South China Sea, or to stop buying arms from the US (after all, Russia sent their ships in SCS for China, and we sent our ships against China, so we already disagree there).
Nope.
First, afaik we are not conducting any military drills with anyone in SCS.
Second, Russia has no claim in SCS and PRC is not part of Russia. So we are not directly in opposition to russia in SCS.
A more correct version of your stmt. would be if India conducts military exercises with UKR (initially deciding to conduct it in Donbass and then changing venue) and also if UKR had been sending dozens of terrorists into russia every weekend and also if UKR had fought 4 major wars with Russia and also if UKR had still possessed nuclear warheads and delivery systems. That would be compable to what russia does now. I don't remember us doing something like that, and I doubt we'd do something like that in the future.
We can't veto every country's relations with Pakistan because our leverages aren't that strong. If we had bought Russian equipment, then we would have had better say on the matter. On one end we want to buy French jets without getting any political concessions out of the French, we want to by American weapons when they still antagonize us. We scale down weapons purchases form Russia and we expect a lot out of them in terms of political considerations.
It is the buyers prerogative where he buys from and sellers prerogative where he sells to. Russia hasn't given us anything for free and neither we forced them. They sold, we bought.
And we didn't expect a lot. All I said was Russia made a move, and that move has consequences.
So India will have to react accordingly based on overall considerations.
If US can have relations with Pakistan (and the US is our biggest foe), then what worse could come out of Russia having relations? compared to the US, I feel more comfortable having Russia in the equation. There is a possibility of some sort of mediation, moderation and influence which Russia will bring to the table, due to it being closely tied to the fate of the region, as opposed to the US.
In fact, there is space for us to play it to our advantage. If Pakistan goes in Russian sphere of influence, US will have lost its foothold in Asia as Iran, China and Russia are already anti-US. This will increase India's value by default. All we have to do is play the bargaining right, and blackmail the US "if you need India on your side, you need to accede to our demands otherwise even we join the China-Russia-Pakistan-India coalition against western interests". Also, earlier US was the ONLY one who was dealing with Pakistan, this caused a 'single vendor' like situation where Pakistan had to take whatever alms the US threw and so the US could get its way for very less cash. Now that Pakistan has a bargaining chip called 'Russia', they will negotiate hard with the US for the same resources which they used to provide till now, for almost free.
Yes, sort of what I implied in an earlier post. But never take the US for a fool. Lot of people think oh, the US is gonna fail, China and Russia will crush it. Chinese are very pragmatic, all they want is for the US not to interfere in their (esp. CCP) business. If that works out, they'll ditch russia in a blink.
Until now, the low cost and high gains made the US very fond of Pakistan. All in all, Russian involvement in Pakistan will make US involvement very costly and diminish the strategic returns. They will have to shell out more and more money to get less and less concessions out of Pakistan. In a way, Pakistan will be removed from the dark spell of western powers and the region as a whole (afg,pak,rus,china,iran,india) will be back to solving its problems on its own without letting a foreign power take advantage of the power struggle within the individual nations. Pakistan is already sitting in the lap of China, now if it sits on the lap of Russia, it is US which should be worried more than India. In away, the US will be more welcoming to Indian plans of hurting Pakistan as a punishment if Pakistan becomes disobedient to them.
Agreed.
Accepting the situation is the best way to deal with this Russian blackmail, that way, we show Russia that they cannot make India budge on any issue just by playing the 'Pakistan card'. We should welcome them and hope they have a good stay. If we start resisting it, even Russia will start thinking that they can use it to blackmail us.
Again, I never said I didn't accept the situation. I just said Russia made a move. India should understand it, and make its own move, to its own advantage.
Edit: It is also interesting that the very reason Russia is pivoting to Asia (and hence Pak) might be the US.
Russia's first choice was and always will be Germany/Europe not china. But the US games in Europa has forced the Russians to turn East into Asia.
Was the Russia-pak relation already taken into account by the US?
Perhaps the US thinks that if everyone in Asia region goes against India, then India will be more malleable to US demands and machinations (contrary to your claim; see underlined, emboldened above)
That seems to be happening.