India and China are aware of the “very high political, economic and military cost of frozen relations,” he says. “China felt it had pushed India too close to the U.S. while India realized that it was losing its vaunted strategic autonomy by getting too close to Washington and turning Beijing into an adversary.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been moving to align India with the United States and freeze out China. Now, efforts to rebuild ties between the Asian giants are gaining momentum.

US president Donald Trump has played down the prospect of imposing so-called “secondary tariffs” on buyers of Russian oil after his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Trump had proposed the levies as a new way of pressuring Russia’s war-time economy if it failed to stop its invasion of Ukraine,