What Did Pakistan Seek To Obtain By Spying On The Indian Embassy In Moscow?

Pakistan has its own reasons to spy on Russian-Indian military and diplomatic ties, but it also can’t be discounted that some of the secrets obtained by this agent were also passed along or sold to the US after Pakistan’s pivot back to it in April 2022.

The latest spy scandal to rock Russia doesn’t involve Western agents for once but a Pakistani one that was stealing secrets from inside the Indian Embassy in Moscow. Satyendra Siwal, who’d been working as a Multi-Tasking Staff security assistant there since 2021, was arrested in his native Uttar Pradesh after the authorities were tipped off about him passing along classified military and diplomatic information. Bloomberg then warned that “The spy allegations risk fresh tensions between India and Pakistan”.

There’s nothing new about these two spying on one another, but what’s unique about this case is that it happened in a third country, particularly Russia with whom India has comprehensively expanded its strategic relations over the past two years while ties with the US recently became troubled late last year. At the same time, Pakistan pivoted back to the West following April 2022’s post-modern coup against Prime Minister Imran Khan, and the country is now regarded as a bastion of US influence in the region.

Pakistan has its own reasons to spy on Russian-Indian military and diplomatic ties, but it also can’t be discounted that some of the secrets obtained by this agent were also passed along or sold to the US. After all, the US has been trying its utmost to pressure India into dumping Russia at the expense of its national interests, but this campaign dramatically failed. Even though some policymakers wanted to move past it in the interests of pragmatism, others remained concerned for hegemonic reasons.

Accordingly, Pakistan’s US-aligned Establishment – which refers to its powerful military-intelligence structures that rule the country behind the scenes – could have thought that sharing this information would help them curry more favor. In practice, corrupt elites might have pursued their own pecuniary interests and/or thought that the US would turn a blind eye to their de facto imposition of martial law, while patriotic ones might have expected US support for IMF aid to help their struggling economy.

In any case, it’s important that the official accusation as shared by the Indian authorities confirms that this act of Pakistani espionage took place inside the Russian capital and concerned the stealing of classified information about the host country’s military and diplomatic ties with their own. Moreover, Pakistan’s pivot back to the West raises suspicions that some of this information ended up in American hands, which makes this incident all the more scandalous.

It’s unclear how Russia will respond, if at all, but there’s no doubt that the incipient trust that it built with Pakistan over the past decade will be damaged. That’s a pity too since the new Pakistani and Russian Ambassadors to one another’s countries seemed sincere in their respective interviews with TASS about continue to strengthen their relations. That just goes to show how irresponsible the Establishment is since they risked putting all that hard-earned progress on the line through this operation.

Considering that Pakistan might have shared some of these stolen secrets to the US, it also can’t be ruled out that they voluntarily shared some of their own bilateral secrets since April 2022’s post-modern coup, such as their cooperation on Afghan and energy-related talks. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose so it’s reasonable that Russia might begin to wonder whether it can even trust Pakistan at all after the Establishment greenlit this high-level espionage operation in Moscow against one of their top partners.