The Kremlin is packing its bags for New Delhi.

Maxim Oreshkin, Putin’s favorite technocrat and the man tasked with keeping Russia’s economy from face-planting under a mountain of sanctions, is headed to India. He’s leading the Russian delegation to the AI Impact Summit 2026. It’s a move that smells like desperation mixed with high-stakes theater.

For those who haven't been keeping track, Oreshkin isn't your typical Russian official. He doesn't spend his time rattling sabers or staring grimly into the middle distance in a military uniform. He’s a numbers guy. A spreadsheet warrior. By sending him, Moscow is signaling that it’s done pretending that domestic "sovereign tech" is anything other than a slow-motion car crash. They need friends. Specifically, they need friends who have access to the silicon and the power grids that Russia currently lacks.

New Delhi in 2026 is the perfect stage for this kind of grift. India has spent the last three years playing a masterful game of geopolitical hopscotch. They buy oil from the Urals, weapons from France, and cloud credits from Seattle. Now, they want to be the world’s AI back office, and they don't particularly care who helps them foot the bill.

But don't expect the talks to be about the "future of humanity." That’s the fluff they feed the press. The real friction is in the hardware.

Right now, a smuggled Nvidia B200 chip—the kind you actually need to train a model worth its salt—costs about $75,000 on the Moscow gray market. That’s a 300% markup from the sticker price, assuming you can even find a middleman who won't disappear with your crypto. Oreshkin’s job isn't to talk about ethical AI or the "digital divide." He’s there to find a way to plug Russia’s aging data centers into India’s burgeoning infrastructure without triggering a fresh wave of secondary sanctions from Washington.

It’s a messy trade-off. Russia has the mathematicians—the guys who can squeeze blood from a stone when it comes to algorithmic efficiency. India has the scale and the increasingly cozy relationships with Western chip designers who are desperate to tap into the subcontinent’s billion-user market.

If you listen to the official PR, this summit is a bridge between the "Global South" and the "Eurasian Heartland." In reality, it’s a bazaar. Moscow is offering cheap energy and military-grade surveillance tech in exchange for a backdoor into the global supply chain. They want to use Indian server farms to train the models that the West has blocked them from building.

It’s not just about the code. It’s about the optics.

By putting Oreshkin front and center, Putin is trying to sanitize the Russian tech brand. He’s the "civilized" face of a regime that has spent the last four years being treated like a digital pariah. If Oreshkin can walk away from New Delhi with a joint venture or a memorandum of understanding on "AI safety," it’s a win for the Kremlin. It says that despite the bans and the boycotts, they still have a seat at the table.

The Biden administration—or whoever is occupying the Oval Office by the time this summit kicks off—will be watching this with gritted teeth. They’ve spent billions trying to build a "silicon curtain" around Russia. But curtains have gaps. And India, with its "strategic autonomy" mantra, is the largest gap on the map.

There’s a specific kind of irony here. The summit’s theme is supposedly about how AI can help the developing world. Yet, the main event is a high-ranking official from a petrostate trying to figure out how to bypass export controls so his country can keep building better facial recognition tools and autonomous drones.

Will the Indian government bite? Probably. They’ve already shown they’re happy to act as the world’s most sophisticated laundromat for Russian crude. Why wouldn't they do the same for Russian compute?

The price of entry for Oreshkin won't be cheap. India knows it holds all the cards. They’ll want deep discounts on energy and maybe a few state secrets on hypersonic missile guidance. It’s a cynical, cold-blooded exchange that has nothing to do with the "democratization of technology" and everything to do with survival.

So, Oreshkin will show up in a well-tailored suit. He’ll shake hands with Indian ministers. He’ll talk about "multipolar tech ecosystems." And then he’ll go back to his hotel room to figure out how many H100s he can sneak through a shell company in Mumbai before the Americans notice.

The only real question left is whether the West actually thinks its export bans are working, or if they’re just waiting for the invoice to arrive in rupees.