Defence Minister A K Antony on Friday concluded his four-day visit to Moscow leaving for home without meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
He is the second senior Indian minister to have visited Moscow in one week who the president hasn't met, the other being External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
Mukherjee, who was in Moscow in 2005 as defence minister, had met Putin then, as did Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha, who were ministers in the BJP-led NDA government.
In an embarrassing gaffe, Mukherjee was stopped and frisked at the airport in Moscow at the time of his departure on October 12, although Indian officials dismissed such reports.
Mukherjee did not meet his counterpart Sergei Lavrov when he went to co-chair the India-Russia Joint Commission meeting on economic, technical and cultural cooperation between the two countries.
Media reports had claimed that the cold reception to the Indian ministers was a rebuff but the Indian government suggested that the meetings could not take place because of schedule constraints of Russian leaders.
During his visit, Antony co-chaired the two-day Indo-Russian Intergovernmental Commission on Military Technical Cooperation with his Russian counterpart Sergei Serdyukov in which he raised New Delhi's concerns over the delay and cost escalation in uprgrading the aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov.
The signing of inter-governmental agreement on the joint development and production of the futuristic fifth generation fighter aircraft was one of the highlights of Antony's Moscow visit, which set the defence agenda for the forthcoming summit meeting of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Putin in November.
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