“In essence, the SJ-100 project may not just be about civil aviation at all,” said a retired two-star IAF veteran. It could well be a ‘proxy’ for sanction-proofing Indo-Russian defence cooperation from Western pressure, while retaining plausible deniability under the guise of a civilian initiative, he added, declining to be named.

https://thewire.in/security/mou-sukhoi-superjet-100s-india-russia-third-attempt-non-combat-aircraft

In the medium term future, the only way russia will be able to effectively project force against far more advanced and well equipped european military powers will be through heavily leveraging transport and cargo aircraft for "launched effects", specifically palletized launched effects that are deployed the same way military cargo aircraft airdrop equipment.

See Rapid Dragon for the US development of this kind of technology. Note how designers, military personnel and policy makers all agree that this technology will be independently developed by many different countries, very quickly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system)

https://thebulletin.org/2023/08/rapid-dragon-the-us-military-game-changer-that-could-affect-conventional-and-nuclear-strategy-and-arms-control-negotiations/

This approach allows a large amount of weapons payload to be deployed from commercial, comparatively easily replacable heavy lift aircraft in a way that is easy to obscure and handwave as "non-military" until you actually throw the cruise missiles out the back of the planes in a mass strike.

Therefor these contracts for large passenger aircraft (and especially cargo aircraft) with russia should be seen in this light. More then selling russia tanks, artillery guns, or even arguably the equivalent value in fighter aircraft, providing russia with a solid backbone for large aircraft production that can circumvent international sanctions secures russia's capacity to project military force as they can simply create a large screen of arguably civilian aircraft from which to launch massive drone and missile swarms from.

India should be condemned for this if things evolve along this vector, it is a serious play for power.

See this video for a relatively recent explanation of the Rapid Dragon system.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w2kx-cKzfhw&pp=ygUbcmFwaWQgZHJhZ29uIG1pc3NpbGUgc3lzdGVt