Multipolarity and diversity are no longer distant aspirations but the realities of the emerging world order. If the Eurasian Charter is to reflect them, it must engage the states absent at its launch on 25 September 2026, above all India. 

On 25 September 2026 in New York, at the negotiations held on Belarus and Russia’s initiative during the high-level week of the 81st UNGA session, nine states signed a Joint Statement on the Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century. The signatories include Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar, Russia, Tajikistan, and Vietnam. India is not in the list. India did not sign. This does not mean India does not share the ideas of the Eurasian Charter. It means that India maintains a careful position.

The Joint Statement by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin following the 23rd Summit in New Delhi in December 2025, includes the partners’ commitment to a multipolar world, recognition of Eurasia’s strategic significance, the creation of a new security architecture. Both leaders called India-Russia relationship an “anchor of peace and stability,” one that will be kept in place through equal and indivisible security. The last part of the Joint Statement highlights that both countries will remain committed to a multipolar world and multipolar Asia. It also welcomes India’s idea to create an SCO Civilizational Dialogue Forum. Indivisible security, multipolarity, dialogue among civilizations—these are the main ideas of the Eurasian Charter and India has already supported them.

So, the real question for New Delhi is whether the vocabulary that works for the two long-standing partners can be made to work across the continent. Moscow faces a mirror question: Will the Eurasian Charter carry the whole of the vocabulary, including the parts that protect India’s freedom to choose friends and keep Asia from tilting towards any single power? I argue that India-Russia partnership, more than any relationship, is a working model that the Eurasian Charter’s drafters can use to scale it up.

A Continent Without an “Umbrella” Structure

Africa and Latin America have numerous sub-regional organizations, and they also have pan-continental ones. In Eurasia, the SCO, the EAEU, ASEAN, the SCTO… each operates within its own framework, but with no common platform where all the continent’s countries and organizations, without exception, could regularly exchange views. The Eurasian Charter is meant to overcome this shortfall.

Its main ideas were articulated during the Eurasian Security Conference held in October 2023 in Minsk, Belarus. In November 2024, Moscow and Minsk agreed on a Joint Vision of the Eurasian Charter’s content, and in New York the founding states agreed on the main terms: decisions are taken by consensus, the working language is English, and the aim is to adopt the Charter at a summit of Eurasian leaders, which would presumably take place before the end of 2027, with the drafting to begin in Minsk in November during the annual Minsk Security Conference.

One provision is worthy of special note. The document does not prejudice the rights and obligations of participating states arising from the UN Charter or other international agreements and arrangements to which they are party.

No commitment is required from participating states to sign the final text, and any state can withdraw at any time. This means that New Delhi would not have to go down on any of its promises in other platforms, such as the Quad, or its engagements with the U.S., Europe, or Japan.

Yet the project has also a sensitive side. The nine founding states include several countries under heavy Western sanctions, and amid the war in Ukraine most Western capitals will likely interpret any text co-authored by Moscow as a confrontation move. India has experienced this pressure first-hand. In August 2025, Washington doubled its tariffs on Indian goods as a penalty for buying Russian oil. Russia should not expect New Delhi to accept any further pressures easily.

Friendship Without a Treaty of Alliance

The Indo-Russian relationship is useful as a model for handling disagreements. Its warmth is real but easy to overstate. The two countries have no mutual defense agreement and have never needed one. According to the October 2000 Declaration of Strategic Partnership, their relationship is built on annual summits, defense-industrial ties, nuclear energy cooperation, and consulting before acting. Neither has asked the other to choose sides.

However, the balance has not always been easy to maintain. Moscow has openly criticized the Quad. During his April 2021 visit to New Delhi, Russian foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described it as an “Asian NATO,” to which his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar noted that no country should have a veto over India‘s partnerships. India maintains the Quad’s membership, and Russia continues to deepen its ties with India. In Samarkand in September 2022, Narendra Modi told Vladimir Putin, in front of the cameras, that “today’s era is not an era of war.” Putin said he understood India’s concerns. Since then, annual summits have continued, and trade in oil, fertilizers, and arms has expanded.

Russia, for its part, has kept close ties with China through every phase of India’s border tensions with Beijing, and India has not demanded that it stop. What Moscow has offered instead is support on matters it cares about most. The December 2025 Joint Statement repeats Russia‘s backing for India’s permanent seat in a reformed UN Security Council and membership in the Nuclear Supplier Group. It also “condemns the April 2025 terrorists and their safe havens”—a language India has not always secured in multilateral settings.

This is the kind of understanding the Eurasian Charter needs: partners who can disagree openly, maintain other relationships, and still respect one another’s core interests. This is a more pragmatic basis for a Eurasian order than any bloc arrangement, because no states will share exactly the same views on their security. 

What Moscow Should Bring into the Charter

If Russia wants India at the negotiation table, it should bring the entire December 2025 Joint Statement’s vocabulary into the Eurasian Charter, including parts that may be less comfortable.

First is the Multipolar Asia clause. For India, commitment to a multipolar Asia means that there must be no single regional power setting the terms. A Eurasian Charter that speaks warmly of multipolarity in the world while staying silent about the balance of power inside Eurasia would be perceived by Indians as written for one great neighbor—China. Russia itself has reasons to be wary about it. Russian foreign-policy experts have voiced concerns that Beijing might increasingly dictate Russia’s Asia policy. A Eurasian order with India’s strong position in it is the best insurance against such an outcome for Russia. 

Second is the link between indivisible security and counterterrorism. The New Delhi Joint Statement places these two ideas together deliberately. For India, security is not an abstract principle: when a state provides shelter to armed groups that operate across borders, its neighbors are inevitably put at risk, regardless of formal alliances or treaties. A Eurasian Charter that limits its security agenda to military blocs and foreign bases will be a simple recast of the European security concerns. A commitment to deny safe heaven to cross-border terrorist organizations would give it a much broader meaning, including for Central Asia which faces the same the threats emerging from Afghanistan.

Third is the restraint in naming enemies. Sergei Lavrov has described the Eurasian Charter as a platform free from external interference. Read narrowly, this means Eurasians settling Eurasian questions among themselves, which India supports. Read broadly, it implies a demand that its members loosen ties with powers outside the continent, which India will refuse, as S. Jaishankar made quite clear speaking about its membership in the Quad.

The Charter’s drafters should choose the narrow reading and specify it in the text. A Eurasian Charter that defines itself by what it opposes will gather only the states that already agree with Moscow. A Eurasian Charter that defines itself by rules of conduct can gather the entire continent.

What New Delhi Should Weigh Up

India has good reasons to be cautious, but remaining outside the negotiation process indefinitely would not serve its interests.

At the BRICS summit hosted by New Delhi last month, Modi urged the Global South to become a “rule-shaper” rather than simply accept rules set elsewhere. The Eurasian Charter is a good rulemaking exercise for India. It would be odd to call for a larger voice in global rulemaking, while leaving the work on the first draft of the code concerning India’s home continent to others.

The practical risks of staying away are obvious. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan are already in the room, and India has courted the region seriously since the first India-Central Asia Summit held in January 2022, with connectivity at the top of the agenda. If China joins later, as it well may, the text will carry Beijing’s preferences more strongly than India’s. A country that arrives in the fourth round can only propose amendment to the document with the structure already set by others.

Furthermore, the terms make a low-cost entry possible. Each state decides the level and composition of its delegation. India could send experts from its Ministry of External Affairs and research institutions rather than a ministerial team, take part in drafting, and keep its decision on the final document entirely open. By doing so, New Delhi would show Washington, Brussels and Tokyo that it is in the room to keep the text inclusive and that its participation binds it to nothing.

Another reason concerns India’s diplomacy. The December 2025 Joint Statement includes New Delhi’s proposal on holding the first session of a SCO Civilizational Dialogue Forum in India this year. The Eurasian Charter, which sees dialogue among civilizations as one of its pillars, would put India’s idea at a far wider stage than any single regional body.

An Agenda for Minsk

If both capitals accept this view, they could take two steps before the first-round meets.

The first step is a joint non-paper. Indian and Russian diplomats could set out, in a few pages, the principles both governments have already signed: indivisible security tied to a duty to deny haven to terrorists, a multipolar world that includes a multipolar Asia, respect for each state’s existing partnerships, and dialogue among civilizations. Submitted to the Chair between rounds, as the terms allow, it would show the other participants that the Eurasian Charter’s vocabulary can unite states with very different alignments.

The second step concerns the Chair. Under the terms, Belarus chairs alone if no other Eurasian state is willing to co-chair. Russia, as the Charter’s co-initiator, could encourage Minsk to offer co-chairmanship to a state from outside the founding nine. India is the natural candidate, although New Delhi may well refuse at this stage. Anyway, such an offer would signify that the process is open—on paper and in practice.

The third step is connectivity, where interests are concrete and politics are unaffected. In September, India and the Eurasian Economic Union agreed to hold a third round of free trade talks in November. Earlier in January, the Indian government had concluded a trade agreement with the European Union. This pairing shows India’s approach in miniature, and the Eurasian Charter should welcome it. A Chapter that commits signatories to keep trade corridors open in times of political tensions, covering the North-South Transport Corridor, the Chennai-Vladivostok Maritime Corridor, and the Northern Sea Route that the December 2025 Joint Statement names, would matter more to Indian and Russian businesses than any declaration about a multipolar world order.

The fourth step is the expert track. The December 2025 Joint Statement welcomes the growing exchanges between Indian and Russian think tanks. In both countries, expert institutions could run a parallel dialogue on the Eurasian Charter’s text and invite scholars from the absent states, including China, Uzbekistan, and Türkiye. A text tested by experts before it reaches ministers is a stronger text.

Beyond the Three Seas

In 1468, a Russia merchant Afanasy Nikitin sailed down the Volga, crossed the Caspian, travelled through Persia, and took a ship for India’s western coast. He spent about three years in the country and left one of the earliest Russian descriptions of India, valued for a realistic view, not a repetition of fantastical legends about India. Incidentally his route runs close to the line of the North-South Transport Corridor.

Nikitin travelled as a trader curious about India, and he recounted life in the country without any ideas to remake it. India-Russia relations have kept that spirit: two societies interested in each other, each content to let the other remain itself.

The Eurasian Charter will succeed only if it carries the same spirit across the continent. India and Russia have, in effect, already written the first draft between themselves. The task now is to make room in it for everyone else.