Neighbours with Varied Dependencies — India vs China on Russian Arms Import
Data Visualisation of the change in arms imports of India & China from Russia between 2017 and 2021
India, known for its steadfast commitment to a policy of non-aggression, consistently refraining from initiating hostilities on the battlefield, has been the world's largest arms importer for the past 30 years, lately followed by Saudi Arabia and Ukraine. Although global arms trading reduced by 5.1% in the past 2 years, India still holds 11% of the total global arms imports despite an 11% drop in its arms imports between 2013–17 and 2018–22.
India started importing arms shortly after its independence in 1947. Initially, it imported a great percentage of its arms from the UK which changed as the years passed to Russia.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is an independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament. SIPRI uses a unique pricing system, the trend-indicator value (TIV), to measure the volume of deliveries of major conventional weapons. The SIPRI TIV measures transfers of military capability rather than the financial value of arms transfers.
Russia took over the UK as the highest arms exporter to India in the early 1990s and ever since has had an increase in exports every year, except for the past 5 years (2017–2021). The dependency of India on Russian arms fell drastically in 2021 with France taking first place.
As a few countries reduced their dependency on Russia for arms (like India, Algeria, Vietnam & Syria), a few countries increased their dependency like Thailand, Belarus, China and the highest being Egypt between 2017 and 2021.
The world map above shows how the dependency on arms from Russia has changed from 2012 to 2021. A drastic reduction of dependency can be observed from the west along with a gradual reduction on the east too.
Over 30 countries reduced their arms dependencies and almost half of the countries completely stopped importing from Russia like Nepal, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico & Venezuela. A handful of countries in the same period did the exact opposite & formed alliances for importing arms from Russia like Pakistan, Jordan & Serbia.
A Deeper Look into the India — China Arms Dynamics with Russia
China and Russia have been getting closer for over 4 decades. They are drawn to each other by the alignment of values, geographical strategies and viewpoints of their current leaders and this is reflected in the arms trade from Russia to China. China imported about $1,997 million TIV of arms from Russia which makes up 81% of the arms imported by China.
The arms imported by the two countries can be categorised into 4 buckets.
China doesn’t import land combat arms like armoured vehicles & artillery from Russia. Interestingly, China reduced its import of air combat & naval combat arms from Russia too between 2012–2016 and 2017–2021. Even in the category of technology & power, by the year 2021, China only imported engines from Russia.
Visualisation Ideation
The approach with this visualisation was to stack multiple layers of information on each other, creating a contextual understanding of the arms import.
The layers of information
Primary Info — Total change in arms imports by a country from Russia in SIPRI Million TIV
Secondary Info — Share of Russian arms imports in the total arms imports of a country.
Tertiary Info — Although the narrative is about India and China, informing about the change in imports of the other countries provides the ability to refer & compare on a broader scale.
Final Visualisation (Publication)
