In late August 2026, China’s J-16s dogfought Egyptian Rafales in a first-of-its-kind exercise, Russia revived its Su-57 pitch to India even as New Delhi signalled the deal was dead, and Turkish and Chinese transport planes made a mysterious 60-hour dash into Pakistani airbases. Individually minor, together they sharpen the question hanging over India’s air force: buy Russian, buy more French or hold out for the indigenous AMCA.
The starting point is Cairo. On August 22, 2026, the second edition of the China-Egypt “Eagles of Civilisation” joint air exercise began across Egyptian airbases, and for the first time ever, China’s J-16 heavyweight fighter went head-to-head with the Egyptian Air Force’s French-built Rafales. It was a milestone moment: the J-16, a twin-seat, twin-engine derivative of the J-11 family built by AVIC Shenyang, is designed for long-range, electronic-warfare-heavy missions, and until now it had never trained directly against a Western 4.5-generation jet.
The J-16 shares systems with the J-10C that Pakistan flew against Indian Rafales in May 2025, so China may now be building a second, cleaner data set on the jet India relies on most
Footage released by the PLA Air Force showed close-range one-on-one engagements, with Chinese pilots reportedly reviewing performance data with their Egyptian counterparts after each sortie. The drills mark a deliberate escalation from the exercise’s 2025 debut, when China sent only its lighter J-10C and J-10S jets to train against Egypt’s older, Russian-origin MiG-29s.
Egypt is one of the few air forces in the world flying American, French, Russian and now increasingly Chinese-linked hardware side by side, which makes it a rare live laboratory. And that is precisely why the Indian Air Force is watching so closely.
The Rafale sits at the heart of India’s own high-end fighter fleet, with a large follow-on acquisition already under discussion, and the IAF has not forgotten the May 2025 clash with Pakistan, in which Islamabad claimed to have downed Indian Rafales using Chinese-origin J-10C fighters armed with PL-15E missiles – claims India has neither confirmed nor fully denied.
Because the J-16 and J-10C share radar, missile and data-fusion architecture, any insight Chinese pilots gain in Egypt into the Rafale’s flight envelope, weapons performance and its closely guarded Spectra electronic-warfare suite effectively build on what Beijing may already have learned from the Pakistan engagement.
Egypt, in effect, hands China a second, cleaner data set on an aircraft India depends on for air dominance.
That same week, a different but related story was unfolding over Pakistan. Between August 19 and 21, open-source flight-tracking data picked up a concentrated, unusual burst of military transport traffic – Turkish Air Force C-130 Hercules and A400M aircraft, including one tracked under the callsign TUAF526, alongside Chinese military transports – making repeated trips into Nur Khan airbase near Rawalpindi, Masroor airbase in Karachi, and Murid airbase, over roughly 60 hours.
Moscow is offering the Su-57E, tech transfer, HAL assembly and a new engine – but it’s a revival of the 2018 FGFA deal India walked away from over cost and technology-sharing disputes
Neither Ankara nor Islamabad has explained what the aircraft were carrying, but Indian defence circles are speculating about drones and drone components possibly linked to Turkish manufacturers Baykar and Asisguard, and Chinese HQ-series air-defence systems.
The timing is telling: the flights came less than two weeks after Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement on August 7, a mutual-defence pact under which an attack on one signatory is treated as an attack on all.
Read together, the airlift looks less like routine resupply and more like fast-tracked implementation of that new pact, layered onto China’s existing role as Pakistan’s largest defence supplier of aircraft, drones and air-defence systems.
Against this backdrop, Russia’s renewed Su-57 courtship of India makes more sense as opportunism than as strategy. Moscow has spent much of 2025-26 offering India the export-grade Su-57E, technology transfer, licensed assembly through Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and even a newer “Izdelie 177S” engine that could plausibly help unstick India’s long-delayed Kaveri engine programme.
This is a revival of a courtship India formally abandoned in 2018, when it exited the joint Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) programme after years of frustration over cost overruns, thin technology transfer, an underwhelming stealth profile and restricted access to source code – despite HAL and Rosoboronexport having already committed roughly $295 million to preliminary design work.
Russia’s eagerness now is best explained by need. Western sanctions have cut Moscow off from lucrative markets, Su-57 production numbers remain modest (around 76 units ordered by the Russian Air Force as of late 2024), and landing India as an export customer would be a significant validation.
India’s likely course could be no fresh Su-57 buy, Su-30MKI upgrades, more Rafales in the near term and accelerated AMCA funding – a hedge rather than a single decisive purchase
India, for its part, appears to have made up its mind. In August 2026, Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh stated plainly that India has no plans to acquire “any new version of the Sukhoi’s”, effectively closing the door on a fresh Su-57 deal for now.
Taken together, these threads describe less a single crisis than a widening gap. China is systematically building a technical profile of the Rafale through both real combat data and repeated live exercises.
Pakistan is simultaneously absorbing Chinese J-10Cs and PL-15 missiles, chasing a reported ambition to field Chinese J-35 stealth fighters by around 2029, and now taking delivery of unexplained Turkish and Chinese hardware just after a new trilateral defence pact.
Russia, meanwhile, is dangling a fifth-generation fighter at exactly the moment India’s own AMCA remains years from a first flight and realistically won’t enter service before the late 2030s. The pace of adversary capability-building is outrunning India’s indigenous timeline, even as India has ruled out the quickest fix on offer.
The most defensible path forward, and the one Indian officials have effectively signalled, isn’t a single dramatic purchase but a layered hedge: no new Su-57 buy, continued “Super Sukhoi” upgrades to the existing Su-30MKI fleet to keep it relevant, more Rafales to hold the high end through the 2030s, and accelerated, well-funded work on the AMCA so the gap doesn’t widen further.
It is an unglamorous answer, but given how closely the Egypt drills, the Su-57 pitch and the Pakistan airlifts landed together in a single August week, India’s room to simply wait this out looks considerably smaller than it did a year ago.
-The writer is a New Delhi-based senior commentator on international and strategic affairs, environmental issues, an interfaith practitioner, and a media consultant. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily carry the views of Raksha Anirveda
