At Aero India 2025, on a warm February morning at Yelahanka Air Force Station near Bengaluru, a small boy tips his head all the way back. Above him a Russian Su-57 hauls itself into a vertical climb, rolls over the top, and falls back toward the crowd. For most of the children on the grass it is just a thrilling shape in the sky. For the men in uniform watching beside them, it is something more complicated: a glimpse of the one thing the Indian Air Force does not have.

India flies some of the finest fourth-generation fighters in the world. What it does not fly — not one — is a stealth jet. And in June 2026, Vladimir Putin stepped into that gap with an offer designed to be hard to refuse.

Speaking to journalists at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on 5 June, the Russian president proposed building the Su-57 together, in India, with full technology transfer and integration of Indian systems. No conditions, he said. No limitations.

An offer with a long history behind it

If the proposal sounds familiar, that is because India has been here before. In 2007 the two countries launched a joint fifth-generation fighter program. A decade later, in 2018, New Delhi walked away, unhappy with the cost, the level of technology access, and the aircraft’s stealth performance. Russia finished the jet alone and called it the Su-57.

Now the roles have quietly reversed. It is Russia courting India, and the sweetener is precisely the thing India walked away over last time: a share of the technology, and a production line on Indian soil.

Why the timing is everything

The urgency is not coming from Moscow. It is coming from the map. China is fielding fifth-generation fighters at a pace that worries every air force in Asia, and there are reports that Pakistan intends to buy China’s J-35 stealth jet. For India, that raises the prospect of being the only one of the three powers without a stealth aircraft.

India is racing to build its own answer, the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft. But even on an optimistic schedule it will not enter service until around 2035. That is a long decade to wait while neighbours fly jets you cannot match.

A genuinely hard choice

This is where the romance of a shiny stealth jet collides with cold arithmetic. Buying 36 to 60 Su-57s would hand India a stealth force almost immediately. But every rupee spent on Russian jets is a rupee not spent on the home-grown AMCA — and, as Manoj Joshi warns, a country that already owns a foreign stealth fighter may lose the will to finish its own.

There was an American option, too. Washington offered India the F-35 in 2025. But the strings attached to U.S. hardware — the monitoring, the end-use controls — sit badly with a country that treats technology transfer as the whole point of a defence deal. Russia, by contrast, is offering to hand over the keys.

For now, India is doing the most Indian thing of all: keeping every door open. Hindustan Aeronautics says it is waiting on Russia’s pricing before taking anything to the air force. The boy at Yelahanka may be in his twenties before his country flies a stealth fighter of its own — and which flag is painted on the first one is still, genuinely, up in the air.

Sources: Defense News (Anjana Pasricha); Observer Research Foundation; remarks at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum.