Putin books Xi first, then Modi, in a nine-meeting SCO slate

Vladimir Putin will hold nine bilateral meetings at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek. Yuri Ushakov, his foreign-policy aide, set the order on Friday. Xi Jinping comes first on 31 August. Narendra Modi comes next the same day. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Masoud Pezeshkian are listed for 1 September. Ushakov told TASS the Xi session will include Power of Siberia 2, the planned gas pipeline into China.

He called the Modi meeting quite interesting and said several important issues had already been agreed for the agenda. The two men are due to continue the conversation at the BRICS summit in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September. Sibi George, secretary (West) in India's Ministry of External Affairs, confirmed the Bishkek bilateral earlier in the week and said other pull-asides would be announced when diaries lock.

Modi left New Delhi on Saturday for a state visit to Uzbekistan, his fourth, at the invitation of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. He flies on to Bishkek for the 26th SCO meeting, which also marks 25 years of the grouping in its present form. Terrorism, trade and connectivity are the public headings on the Indian brief.

Why the order of the rooms matters

Russia is in the fifth year of its war in Ukraine. Sanctions have pushed more of its oil and gas east and south. China is the buyer that can take pipeline gas at scale. Power of Siberia 2, if built, would move additional west Siberian volumes toward China and deepen a dependence that already runs through the first Power of Siberia line. Putting that file in the first bilateral of the day tells the rest of the summit what Moscow wants signed in public view.

India is the buyer that still takes seaborne Russian oil and that still talks to Washington and Europe. Modi has said Russia should end the war. He will sit down with Putin hours after Putin sits down with Xi. The sequence is not an insult. It is a queue. Ushakov's phrase about an interesting meeting is the Kremlin's way of saying the India hour is not a courtesy call. Trade imbalance, fertilisers, nuclear projects and the language of the SCO statement on terrorism are the likely contents.

Erdoğan and Pezeshkian fill Tuesday. Turkey has mediated grain and prisoner deals and has sold drones to Ukraine. Iran is six months into a war with the United States that has kept the Strait of Hormuz closed on Tehran's account and has cut Iranian trade by the 35 percent President Pezeshkian cited this week. A Putin-Pezeshkian meeting on the SCO fringe is a signal to those two files, not a tourism slot.

What Bishkek can and cannot do

The SCO cannot lift Western sanctions or reopen Hormuz. It can produce a communiqué that avoids naming Russia as the author of the Ukraine war and that repeats stock language on terrorism. For New Delhi that language matters because India wants the organisation to stay usable after the grouping's expansion. For Moscow the photograph with Xi and then with Modi is the product. Isolation is the charge it wants to answer.

Ushakov said major gatherings exist so that leaders can hold these side meetings. He has scheduled nine of them. The first two on Monday, China then India, are the ones that will be read against the war, the pipeline and the oil trade. The rest of the slate fills the diary. The test of the week is whether any of the nine meetings produces a number, a route or a date that was not already in the briefing papers.