As Russian President Vladimir Putin flew out of Delhi for the colder climes of Moscow, a stock-taking of what really happened behind the glamour and glitz of the high-profile visit reveals that there was as much substance as there were hopes pinned on this one visit in the midst of a European war and efforts to strike a peace bargain.

The trip to India, after a four-year gap, was not driven by a single motive. It was, instead, a calibrated mix of geopolitical signaling, strategic hedging, and hard economic bargaining, all wrapped in the optics of a long-standing personal equation with New Delhi.

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Putin knew well that the optics of his trip to India would ripple across Western capitals. A sanctioned, diplomatically isolated leader being warmly received by a Quad member and a

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