Tamil Nadu – Russia links: from nostalgia to collaboration

Tamil Nadu – Russia links: from nostalgia to collaboration
Author: Venkatakrishnan Asuri

The warm ties between Delhi and Moscow, having withered major geopolitical winds, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union, have continued over the decades. It is in this regard that we look deeper into relations between Russia and Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state with the third largest coastline in India.

Among various links which have developed over the decades between Russia and Tamil Nadu, an important pillar of this relationship is the Chennai-Vladivostok Maritime Corridor (CVMC), with the corridor becoming operational in November 2024.

The Memorandum of Intent for the CVMC was signed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September 2019, and was seen as the expansion of Indo-Russian ties beyond merely the respective capital cities. The striking features of this corridor are its geography and reduced transit time. The existing route between Mumbai and St. Petersburg takes around 30-45 days, passing through the Red Sea in an increasingly turbulent West Asia, which faces significant disruptions due to volatility from conflicts, including Houthi attacks, increasing the journey time to 48 days. In contrast, the CVMC takes only 24 days, reducing the time by 40%, and more importantly avoids disruptive hotspots or bottlenecks, directly passing through the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea, to the Russian port city of Vladivostok.

While the geography of the CVMC is impeccable, a deeper dive into the composition of goods flowing through it reveals both asymmetry and opportunity. In a 2020 report¹, the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) had estimated a conservative $30 billion of bilateral trade volume by 2025 – this has been decisively surpassed, with the actual trade hitting $68.7 billion² in FY2024-25. However, this growth is quite skewed, with energy imports accounting for nearly 84% of the total trade volume. Stripping the trade of energy imports, the volume comes to a mere $12 billion³, implying the need for increased diversification through this newly functional trade corridor. In the domain of Russia-Tamil Nadu ties, the opportunities for diversification and expansion are several, primarily in agricultural, industrial and even the energy sector.

In the energy sector, Russian investments in Tamil Nadu have been significant, with the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) standing as the flagship of Indo-Russian technological cooperation. With a cost of nearly $16.3 billion⁴ involving various Russian companies such as Rosatom, Atomstroyexport and TVEL, the strategic depth of this collaboration was recently underscored when the first fuel consignment for Unit-3 of the plant was delivered, coinciding with the Russian President’s visit to New Delhi. The power plant, apart from being a symbol of cooperation between India and Russia, has also been instrumental in stabilizing the regional industrial base, mitigating power deficits, with roughly 50% of its power generation allocated to the state’s grid⁵.

Beyond the traditional sphere of nuclear energy, in which Russia holds considerable expertise, Russian investments in the state have also been moving towards green energy and critical minerals. In 2017, the Miyota Power project in Virudhunagar marked the first Russian investment of $80 million⁶ in Tamil Nadu’s green energy sector, with a capacity of 100 MV, one-fifth of Miyota’s total capacity in India. Furthermore, NLC India Ltd. is currently negotiating a strategic partnership with a Russian company to secure lithium from mines in Mali⁷, which serves dual purpose in helping to leverage Russian expertise while also insulating and diversifying India’s supply chains from Chinese overdependence. The secure supply of lithium is particularly important for Tamil Nadu, which currently accounts for nearly 40% of India’s electric vehicle production⁸, recently attracting investments of over ₹50,000 crore⁹ from EV giants like VinFast and Tata Motors. 

The energy-wise expansion of the CVMC also brings in the discussion on Russian crude, which has been in recent spotlight for a variety of reasons. The asymmetry of the CVMC lies in the refining capacities of India’s west and east coasts – with most of the refineries of ESPO crude (Urals) lying on India’s west coast, in Gujarat and Maharashtra, while southern refineries are mainly designed for Middle Eastern crude. To address this, the Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited (CPCL) is expediting its Cauvery Basin Refinery (CBR) project at Nagapattinam, which is calibrated at a planned capacity of 9 MMTPA with the ability to process heavier Russian crude¹⁰. In a similar manner, the CVMC also has not solved the Eastern LNG bottleneck, with the Eastern coast’s LNG capacity being merely 5 MMTPA¹¹, in contrast to the Western coast’s capacity of 27.5 MMTPA¹². A similar source for potential expansion lies in coking coal, which has not seen a significant change in sourcing pattern since 2022 due to Australian coal supply lines being better entrenched.

While energy and industry dominate the discussion on the CVMC, the fertilizer trade constitutes a critical pillar of the bilateral trade, with fertilizers being the second largest commodity by volume after crude oil. It is also crucial due to the fact that Russia controls nearly 77-92% of the market share for fertilizers of specific and high-yield categories¹³. This near monopoly, alongside a stable trade corridor also acts as a vital lifeline for Tamil Nadu’s agricultural sector, which absorbs a fair share of the total Russian fertilizer imports flowing into India. The geography of the corridor also ensures that critical soil nutrients, particularly potash and complex fertilizers, reach the rich Cauvery Delta regions prior to planting seasons, insulating Tamil Nadu’s food security from future supply chain volatility. This, of course, is apart from the fact that transit times are also slashed from the historic 40-day average via Mumbai to just 24 days.

The agricultural coincidence of the CVMC comes in the backdrop of Russia facing nearly 9-10% overall food inflation, with specific sectors like dairy and eggs¹⁴ escalating to 14% – driven mainly by isolation from traditional European food markets and structural deficits in consumer staples. This inflationary pressure offers an excellent point of entry for Tamil Nadu’s diversified agricultural ecosystem to pivot from domestic to an active food exporter. The poultry hub of Namakkal in Tamil Nadu is a global leader in egg production, and possesses the supply elasticity to redirect surplus output towards the Russian market. In the marine sector, Tamil Nadu’s advantage lies in its exports of Pacific White Shrimp, comprising nearly 77% of its seafood export valu¹⁵. With the EU and Norway having severed access to the Atlantic salmon and trout, the gradually changing Russian consumption patterns coincide with Tamil Nadu’s processing hubs in Tuticorin and Chennai.

In essence, the ties between Russia and Tamil Nadu have very much transcended from mere Soviet-era nostalgia to a structural shift in logistics, supply chains, and technological cooperation. The deepening ties are also further evidenced by the ongoing “Sister City” cooperation talks between Vladivostok and Chennai, aimed at fostering people-to-people exchange. While the CVMC is anchored in Chennai, the strategic vision for the maritime corridor also expands into the Eastern Maritime Corridor (EMC), with the corridor being expanded to integrate into the prosperous ports of Vizag and Paradip, which serve as critical nodes for pharmaceutical and industrial exports.

Venkatakrishnan Asuri is an undergraduate student at IIT Madras and a keen observer of geopolitics. He has also studied Russian language.

Photo: Fedor Shlyapnikov

Bibliography

"Embassy of India, Moscow (Russia)." Indianembassy-Moscow.gov.in. Accessed February 3, 2026.
https://indianembassy-moscow.gov.in/overview.php.

ET Online. "NLC India in Advanced Talks with Russian Firm for Sourcing Lithium." The Economic Times, July 13, 2025.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/indl-goods/svs/metals-mining/nlc-india-in-advanced-talks-with-russian-firm-for-sourcing-lithium/articleshow/122414815.cms.

"India-Russia Trade: Expanding beyond Energy." NatStrat. 2025.
https://www.natstrat.org/articledetail/publications/india-russia-trade-expanding-beyond-energy-237.html.

"India–Russia Fertiliser Trade: Outlook, Projects and Growth." Sberbank Branch in India. December 17, 2025.
https://sberbank.co.in/media/publications/outlook-for-indiarussia-fertiliser-imports-projects-and-solutions.

Indian Oil. "Natural Gas." Accessed February 3, 2026.
https://iocl.com/pages/natural-gas-overview.

Indian Oil. "PM Lays Stone for Nagapattinam Refinery." February 18, 2021.
https://www.iocl.com/MediaDetails/59109.

Kandavel, Sangeetha. "Of the 10 Lakh Electric Vehicles Sold in India, 4 Lakh EVs Were Made in Tamil Nadu." The Hindu, September 25, 2023.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/of-the-10-lakh-electric-vehicles-sold-in-india-4-lakh-evs-were-made-in-tamil-nadu/article67343737.ece.

Kapoor, Nivedita, and Gayathri Iyer. "East Meets East: An Assessment of the Proposed Chennai-Vladivostok Maritime Corridor." Observer Research Foundation. 2020.
https://www.orfonline.org/public/uploads/posts/pdf/20230722232922.pdf.

"Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, Tamil Nadu, India." Power Technology. Accessed February 3, 2026.
https://www.power-technology.com/projects/kudankulam-nuclear-power-plant/.

"LNG Terminals in India: Terminal-Wise Capacity, Throughput & Expansion (2017–2025)." Fuelengineering.in. January 20, 2026.
https://fuelengineering.in/lng-terminals-in-india-terminal-wise.

"The Sea as Treasure Chest." The Times of India, January 5, 2025.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/the-sea-as-treasure-chest/articleshow/116971022.cms.

Shivakumar, C. "TN’s New EV Policy Targets Rs 50,000 Crore Investment, 1.5 Lakh Jobs in Five Years." The New Indian Express, February 15, 2023.
https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/tamil-nadu/2023/Feb/15/tns-new-ev-policy-targets-rs-50000-crore-investment-15-lakh-jobs-in-five-years-2547621.html.

Singh, Surendra. "Russia Ships 187-Ton Pressuriser to India for Kudankulam N-Plant Unit 5." The Times of India, April 6, 2023.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/russia-ships-187-ton-pressuriser-to-india-for-kudankulam-n-plant-unit-5/articleshow/99293776.cms.

Special Correspondent. "Russian Firms Invest $80m in Solar Power Project." The Hindu, March 25, 2017.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/russian-firms-invest-80m-in-solar-power-project/article17664710.ece.

TASS. "Chicken Eggs Prices in Russia up by 15% in November, Statistics Says." December 8, 2023.
https://tass.com/economy/1718381.