The prestigious Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), one of the UK’s top think tanks, recently published a report accusing India and other countries of secretly helping Russia launder sanctioned Western military components to equip its armed forces. They claim that some of the Russian equipment recovered from Ukraine contains components that it’s not supposed to have, speculating that companies from the Czech Republic, Serbia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and China might have been responsible for surreptitiously sourcing them for Moscow. India’s inclusion in the list is noteworthy since this South Asian state has recently come under unprecedented US-led Western information warfare pressure as punishment for its principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict.

There’s a concerted Western-wide effort presently underway to pressure India into distancing itself from is special and privileged strategic partner at the expense of its objective national interests in order to advance America’s zero-sum ones in the New Cold War. All prior attempts such as accusing it of being on the wrong side of history and threatening it with vague long-term significant consequences counterproductively worsened the West’s image in the minds of Indian decisionmakers and the society that they represent. Nevertheless, this Hybrid War campaign might be about to escalate with implied sanctions threats, whether primary ones or secondary sanctions, on the false basis of the pure speculation that was irresponsibly propagated by RUSI.

It’s not India that’s laundering anything to Russia, but RUSI itself that’s laundering the US-led West’s infowar narratives into the public discourse in order to obscure their original sourcing from those countries’ foreign intelligence agencies.