Putin lands in Delhi for his first BRICS summit abroad since 2022

Vladimir Putin landed at Palam in the early hours of Friday, 11 September, and began a three-day stay built around the 18th BRICS Summit and a bilateral meeting with Narendra Modi. Kirti Vardhan Singh, minister of state for external affairs, received him. Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal called the relationship a Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership and posted welcome footage as the aircraft door opened.

It is Putin's first in-person BRICS summit outside Russia since the Ukraine war began in February 2022. He was in Delhi as recently as December 2025 for the annual bilateral summit and met Modi again in Bishkek on 31 August at the SCO gathering. The Friday programme is dense. The Kremlin said he will address the BRICS Business Forum plenary, hold talks with Modi, and walk the INNOPROM industrial exhibition organised by the two industry ministries.

Indian briefings list the bilateral agenda as defence, energy, technology, pharmaceuticals and people-to-people ties. Amar Ujala reported that nuclear power plant construction may come up. Russia remains a core supplier of military hardware and discounted crude to India. The Hormuz disruption has made that crude more valuable and more complicated. Secondary sanctions talk in Washington sits in the same week as Putin's arrival.

The Hindu listed the wider guest list: Xi Jinping, Masoud Pezeshkian, Cyril Ramaphosa, Prabowo Subianto, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Anwar Ibrahim, Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abiy Ahmed Ali and Vietnam's Le Minh Hung among them. Eight of eleven full members are sending heads of state or government. Partner countries and outreach groups, including the GCC and the African Union, add further delegations.

India assumed the BRICS chair on 1 January 2026. The official themes for Saturday's closed session are inclusive global governance and multilateralism. Leaders are then scheduled to tour a Bharat Innovates exhibition, stand for a family photograph on the Bharat Mandapam lawns and plant trees. Those pictures will be the public face of a meeting whose private argument is energy, food and supply-chain insurance in a year of two wars.

Putin's presence is the most legally awkward of the arrivals. The International Criminal Court has an outstanding warrant. India is not a party to the Rome Statute and has hosted him before. Western governments will treat the Delhi handshake as another data point in New Delhi's refusal to isolate Moscow. Indian officials will treat it as continuity with a defence and energy partner that predates the present war.

Jaishankar visited Kyiv this month. Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked India for a stated wish to end the war. That trip and this arrival sit in the same fortnight. The sequencing is deliberate. India wants to talk to both capitals without accepting either capital's framing as its own.

Trade is the quieter file. Rupee-rouble settlement, delayed payments and the discount on Urals crude have been the working reality of the relationship since 2022. INNOPROM is meant to show manufacturers, not only oil traders. Whether that exhibition produces contracts will be clearer after the leaders leave than during the walk-through.

Security for the visit is part of the larger summit grid: 30,000 personnel, Chanakyapuri hotel cordons, and a 300-kilometre aviation box until Sunday night. Putin's aircraft used Palam, the air force station, rather than the civil terminals. That choice is standard for this guest and reduces the time he spends on public roads.

By Friday afternoon the test is the Modi meeting, not the tarmac photographs. Defence deliveries, energy volumes and any language on Ukraine or Iran that India can live with in a BRICS text will tell more than the welcome tweets. Putin will still be in the city when Xi lands on Saturday. The two visitors do not need Delhi to meet each other. They do need Delhi if they want the summit communique to carry their preferred lines on the wars that follow them into the room.