The loud argument in Delhi this week is about manned jets. The quieter one, if it is real, is about the engine that would let an Indian combat drone fly without asking anyone else for a core. Defence blogs last year described an India–Russia protocol, dated to talks in Moscow in August 2025, to co-develop twin-engine powerplants for uncrewed combat aircraft from the AL-55I family already used on HAL’s HJT-36 Yashas trainer. The same accounts named HAL, DRDO’s Aeronautical Development Establishment and Russia’s United Engine Corporation or NPO Saturn, spoke of Koraput doing most of the manufacture, and sketched a 30-to-35 kilonewton dry twin for a 10-to-15-tonne unmanned fighter that could work from land or a deck. None of that package has been published this week by the Ministry of Defence, HAL or UEC as a signed, funded programme with an engine designation, a workshare table and a delivery year. Until those papers exist, treat the protocol as reported intent, not metal.
What is public, and what matters more than a pavilion fighter, is that propulsion is still India’s hardest aerospace problem. Ghatak, the flying-wing stealth UCAV, is planned around a dry Kaveri derivative of about 49 kilonewtons. That engine’s certification is itself a programme risk. A twin derived from a proven Russian small turbofan would be a different bet. It would trade some sovereignty for a shorter path to a reliable core, hot-section metallurgy and a full-authority digital control system. It would also sit beside two other Russian engine offers that did surface during the BRICS visit. Sputnik and Indian outlets reported a fresh pitch of the Izdeliye 177S for the Super Sukhoi upgrade of the Su-30MKI, with claimed thrust of about 14.5 tonnes, a 6,000-hour life and lower fuel burn, and dimensions close to the AL-31FP that HAL already builds at Koraput. Engine technology on the Su-57 has been described as conditional on buying the aircraft. CSIR-NAL and UEC signed a non-disclosure agreement at Wings India 2026 to talk about next-generation engines. Those are three separate conversations. They are not one joint combat-drone engine factory.
The strategic test is design rights. Co-development only changes India’s position if India can own the drawings, the blade alloys, the single-crystal process and the right to improve the engine after the Russians go home. Licensed assembly of a sealed core is not independence. It is another AL-31 story with a UAV badge. A twin UCAV engine would also have to survive sanctions risk, spare-blade supply and the political question of whether a Russian hot section can sit on an Indian loyal-wingman that may one day fly with Western sensors. Ghatak’s Kaveri path is slower and more Indian. The AL-55-derived path, if the protocol is more than a brief, would be faster and more entangled. The BRICS week has not settled which India wants. It has only made the right question visible. Fighters make photographs. Engines decide whether the next unmanned combat aircraft is an Indian machine or a licensed airframe waiting on a sanctioned spare.