When India’s cooking gas ran short in March 2026, the reason was simple: almost all of it had been travelling through one narrow passage in the Middle East. The crisis exposed what the energy experts had long warned us about: India had built its entire energy system around a single road, and that road had been blocked due to the Iran-U.S. conflict.
But quietly, India has been laying the foundation for a completely different route. One that runs not through the Red Sea, not through the Persian Gulf, but through the ice-capped Arctic.
India consumes roughly 5.5 million barrels of oil every day, making it the world’s third-largest oil importer (according to India Briefing, March 2026). For decades, almost 60% of that oil has passed through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow gap between Iran and Oman that connects the Persian Gulf to the open sea.
Through this single strait passes about 20% of the world’s entire supply. Now that it is threatened, the whole world feels it. And countries like India, that import 87% of its crude oil, had no quick alternative. But India has already started looking for ways out, and those ways lead north.
The Hormuz crisis was not an isolated event. India had already been squeezed from other directions as well. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it began selling oil at steep discounts to whoever was willing to buy. India took the deal. By 2025, Russia was supplying around 38% of India’s crude oil, increasing considerably from just 2.5% before the war.
Seeing this, Trump imposed a total 50% tariff on Indian goods, with 25% explicitly tied to India’s purchases of Russian oil. In October, Washington sanctioned Rosneft and Lukoil, the companies supplying 60% of India’s Russian crude. The EU simultaneously banned petroleum products refined from Russian crude, directly threatening India’s growing refinery export business to Europe.
The pressure temporarily worked. By December of 2025, Russian oil imports fell to a 38-month low. Major Indian refiners paused orders. A trade deal in February 2026 cut US tariffs to 18%, and Trump publicly claimed India had “agreed to stop buying Russian Oil.”
India’s diplomatic stance was measured and pragmatic, emphasising that “the energy security of 1.4 billion Indians is the supreme priority of our government,” while not referring to President Trump’s claims.
It was an obvious contradiction. While India faced penalties for purchasing Russian oil, Europe bought €4.48 billion worth of Russian LNG in the first six months of 2025 alone, up by 22% from the previous year. This meant that India was being penalised for activities that Europe continued doing, without consequences. But then, the blockade of Hormuz happened, and with it came a 30-day sanction reprieve for India.
The point here is that every path India relies on has to negotiate through someone else’s politics.
This is the context that makes India’s Arctic move crucial. It is not simply a trade route. India attempts to build a supply line that no external power can easily switch off.
The Northern Sea Route runs along the top of Russia, connecting Europe to Asia across the roof of the world.
Notably, climate change has been melting the ice faster than predicted. With Russia’s fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, seven today and a projected 10 by 2027, the route is now navigable for longer stretches of the year, and in some sections, all year.
The numbers make the case even more compelling. The traditional Suez Canal Route between Russia and India covers 16,000 kms and takes about 40 days. The Arctic route cuts that to 5,600 nautical miles and roughly 24 days. It is faster, cheaper, and most importantly, bypasses the Strait of Hormuz entirely.
But the obstacles persist. Moving cautiously, India’s then Oil Secretary, Pankaj Jain, stated in 2024 that India would not buy from Russia’s sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project, the very project that Novatek is most eager to sell. Going too deep into harnessing Arctic energy risks triggering the same secondary sanctions India has spent a year carefully avoiding.
Nevertheless, from a ‘Hard No’ in 2024, India’s stand softened in February 2025, with Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Hardeep Singh Puri signalling “open for cooperation with all countries in the world.
In this calibrated hard-soft approach, India has been quietly building the channel. The Chennai-Vladivostok Eastern Maritime Corridor became operational in late 2024, cutting the old Russia-India shipping time nearly in half, and is already carrying crude oil, coal, fertilisers, etc.
In January 2026, the RELOS (Reciprocal Exchange of Logistics Support) military logistics pact gave India access to Russian ports from Vladivostok to Murmansk, which serves as the gateway of the Northern Sea Route. India can now, in principle, send its navy to protect its own tankers in this corridor.
At the end of that corridor sits Russia’s Arctic gas reserves, which are estimated at 30% of the world’s untapped natural gas. Novatek began formally courting a reluctant India as a buyer for its Arctic LNG in early 2025. However, the US-Israel war on Iran in early 2026 has certainly altered India’s energy calculus. By March 2026, India and Russia had resumed direct LNG supply talks for the first time since the Ukraine war began. The Hormuz crisis has expedited the negotiations.
Because Russia controls access to the Northern Sea Route under international law, a route that runs through the supplier’s territory is not free. It’s just a different form of dependency. Adding to that, India, for now, lacks the technology needed to run this route independently. We have no ice-class ships, barely any cold-weather navigation training, and no Arctic-capable hull tech. But these are not the reasons to abandon the route; they are the challenges that we need to address and overcome.
The tightrope is real. The West is pulling one way, Russia another, and the Gulf’s instability is just pushing it straight down. What India is trying to build in the Arctic is not a solution but a way to break that rope, so it can find its own footing to survive in the ever-shifting terra firma of geopolitics across continents.
As the Observer Research Foundation put it in December 2025, New Delhi is “no longer a passive consumer of the Arctic hydrocarbons, it is positioning itself as a rule-shaper in the emerging Arctic order.”
That is a remarkable place to be for a country that, four years ago, bought almost no oil from Russia at all.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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