India & Iran in Belarus war games: how Malta’s neutrality sails between super-powers

India, Iran join Belarus-Russia military drills – what it means for Malta’s neutral voice
By Antoine Cassar, Hot Malta correspondent

Valletta’s Grand Harbour usually wakes up to the low hum of cruise-liner engines and the clatter of cappuccino cups, not the rumble of distant tanks. Yet when news broke this week that India and Iran are sending troops to Belarus for the 2025 edition of the “Slavic Brotherhood” drills alongside Russia, the chatter in Strait-Street bars shifted from last weekend’s Isle of MTV line-up to whether Malta’s long-cherited neutrality is still seaworthy in a world where old Cold-War lines are being redrawn from the Arabian Sea to the Baltic.

The Indian contingent will reportedly field T-90 tanks and Su-30 pilots; Iran is dispatching drone specialists and naval-marines. For the first time, the exercise will include a simulated amphibious landing on the artificial island of Ostrov, 300 km from the Polish border—an echo, some Valletta analysts say, of how Malta itself was once the hinge between continents, fought over by Ottomans, Knights and NATO convoys alike.

From Malta’s vantage point—halfway between Mumbai and Minsk—the expansion of the drills is more than a Kremlin show of force. It is a geopolitical weather-vane spinning fast enough to rattle the balconies of Sliema. “We are watching the birth of a Eurasian security bloc that stretches from Goa to Grodno,” Miriam Xuereb, senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Malta, told Hot Malta. “For a micro-state whose constitution still carries the word ‘neutral’, that bloc represents both risk and opportunity.”

Risk, because Malta’s Exclusive Economic Zone is criss-crossed by the Med-Red Sea shipping lane that India now patrols as part of its anti-piracy mission. Opportunity, because Maltese-flagged merchant vessels—still the world’s seventh largest fleet—could benefit from any multilateral security framework that keeps Hormuz and Suez open, even if brokered by Moscow rather than Brussels.

Inside the Indian community, the largest non-EU cohort on the islands, reactions are split. “My cousin in Pune is proud to see the tricolour beside the Iranian flag,” says Rudra Prakash, manager of the Namaste snack-bar in Paceville. “But my Maltese customers ask whether Indian tanks will soon be training at Pembroke ranges.” The answer, for now, is no: Malta’s 2024 defence white paper reaffirms neutrality, and Foreign Minister Ian Borg told parliament on Tuesday that Malta has “not been approached and would decline” any observer status at Slavic Brotherhood.

Still, the cultural ripples are visible. This evening, the Malta Indian-Iranian Friendship Society—yes, it exists, founded last year after a shared Hola Mohalla-Nowruz picnic in Għajn Tuffieħa—will screen a documentary on Indo-Iranian military ties at Spazju Kreativ, followed by a panel that includes a retired AFM colonel and the Iranian chargé d’affaires. Tickets sold out in 90 minutes, proving that Grandmaster De Valette’s fortress city remains fascinated by every new power that sails the inland sea.

Down at the Valletta marina, Russian super-yachts—now re-flagged to the Marshall Islands—are berthed beside Emirati catamarans. Captain Lawrence Zammit, who ferries tourists to Comino, shrugs: “Neutrality is our product. We sell calm water between storms. If India and Iran want to practise war in Belarus, we’ll keep practising peace here—so long as the charter money keeps flowing.”

Yet neutrality is not nostalgia. Earlier this month, Malta quietly hosted the EUNAVFOR Aspides headquarters in Luqa, a move that irritated Moscow. The same week, a delegation from the Confederation of Maltese Enterprises signed an MoU with the Maharashtra Shipyards Association to retrofit LNG engines on ageing tankers—technology that could one day power Iranian vessels if sanctions ease. “We’re threading a needle,” admits Marlene Farrugia, CEO of Med-Link Consultants, “between the neutrality clause that tourism loves and the strategic hedging that business needs.”

For ordinary Maltese, the drills feel distant until fuel prices tick up. On Monday, Enemed raised diesel by two cents, citing “geopolitical risk premiums” after the Belarus announcement. In the words of 72-year-old Toni “il-Belliegħa” from Birkirkara, queueing for ħobż at Serkin: “When Russia sneezes, India catches cold, and Malta ends up paying for the Kleenex.”

Conclusion
History teaches that when empires pivot, Malta pivots with them—sometimes as pawn, sometimes as port. The entry of India and Iran into Slavic Brotherhood does not herald tanks on Manoel Island, but it does remind the nation that neutrality is not a granite statue; it is a living balance beam. As monsoon-bred officers trade salutes with Cossacks 3,000 km away, Malta’s real exercise is at home: keeping its doors open to every merchant, its constitution untouched by foreign boots, and its voice in the UN calling—loudly, if politely—for the world to remember the smallest harbours still have the loudest echoes.