Putin lands in Delhi for first BRICS summit outside Russia since the Ukraine war

Vladimir Putin arrived in New Delhi in the early hours of Friday, 11 September, for a three-day visit that pairs a bilateral meeting with Narendra Modi and Russia’s first in-person appearance at a BRICS summit held outside Russia since February 2022.

Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh received the Russian president at Palam Air Force Station. External Affairs Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal posted that India and Russia share “multifaceted and longstanding ties anchored in a Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership.” Putin travelled with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov.

The two leaders are scheduled to sit down at 3.30 p.m. on Friday. The Kremlin said Putin will also address the plenary of the BRICS Business Forum the same day and walk the INNOPROM industrial exhibition with Modi. The exhibition was organised by the industry and trade ministries of both countries. The leaders’ summit itself opens on 12 September at Bharat Mandapam and runs through 13 September. India holds the 2026 BRICS chair.

What Moscow put on the agenda

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov briefed reporters before the visit. He said Indian firms want to expand investment inside Russia and that Russian companies want a larger presence in India. Energy trade, he said, is still running at high monthly volumes of crude, though he did not publish a figure. Moscow is also ready to talk about civil nuclear reactors that India wants to build.

Defence is the other hard file. Peskov said the two sides are discussing upgrades to BrahMos missiles and remaining deliveries of S-400 air defence batteries. He also said Russia is open to selling the Su-57 fifth-generation fighter and to sharing technology linked to the aircraft. Those items have circulated in Indian and Russian briefings for months. Friday is the first time the two leaders can take them up in the same room since they met on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek last month.

Ukraine will be on the table. Peskov said the meeting gives Putin a chance to brief Modi on the battlefield and that Moscow welcomes India’s willingness to help a settlement through dialogue. He added that the two sides will exchange views on the Persian Gulf and on Iran. Those files sit next to the oil price spike of the past week, after tanker attacks pushed Brent above $107 a barrel on 10 September.

A crowded weekend in the capital

Putin is not the only arrival. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian landed for his own bilateral with Modi. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other BRICS and partner-country delegations are in the city. Delhi Police have put about 15,000 personnel on the streets, with 200 companies of paramilitary forces and more than 500 additional cameras. The Directorate of Education closed government, aided and private schools in Delhi on 11 September because of traffic diversions around the summit.

The grouping marks twenty years this cycle. Membership now stretches well beyond the original five. That wider table is also the source of strain. India is hosting both Iran and the United Arab Emirates in the same week that Algiers cut diplomatic ties with Abu Dhabi and closed its airspace. A BRICS ministerial meeting in May failed to produce a joint declaration. Officials in Delhi have spent the past fortnight trying to keep a leaders’ text intact.

Why the visit is timed this way

Putin has attended BRICS gatherings hosted by Russia since the full-scale war in Ukraine began. Travelling to Delhi is a different calculation. India has refused to join Western sanctions, has bought large volumes of discounted Russian crude, and has kept the defence supply line open. It has also kept channels to Washington, Paris and Tokyo. Modi used a video address in Paris this week to restate Indian space plans with France. The same week, he meets the Russian president in person.

That mix is the point of the bilateral. Trade settlement in national currencies, pending defence hardware, civil nuclear talks and a public line on Ukraine will all be measured against what the two men say after 3.30 p.m. Peskov called the relationship “very pragmatic” and said the leaders can discuss sensitive issues directly. Indian officials have used similar language without committing to any new platform on the war.

The immediate test is narrower. Can the two sides announce anything concrete on Su-57, BrahMos, S-400 or nuclear reactors before the summit cameras turn to the family photograph on Saturday? If they cannot, the visit still has value as the first time Putin has sat inside a BRICS leaders’ meeting on another country’s soil since the war began. That fact, more than the communique language, is what other capitals will record.

Modi posted on Friday that he expects “positive and meaningful discussions on various issues with aspirations for global welfare.” The Sanskrit couplet he circulated ahead of the summit stressed dialogue. The talks this afternoon will show how much of that dialogue is bilateral business and how much is an attempt to keep a fractured 20-year-old grouping on a single page.