Putin meets Modi on Friday with Su-57, reactors and a $50 billion deficit on the table

Vladimir Putin will sit down with Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Friday, 11 September, the day before India opens the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the bilateral on Tuesday and listed the items Moscow wants on the table: Su-57 fighters and technology transfer, more civil nuclear plants, BrahMos upgrades, remaining S-400 deliveries, rare earths, and settlement in national currencies. It will be the second Modi-Putin meeting in two weeks. They last met on 31 August on the margins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek.

Peskov, briefing Indian journalists online through Sputnik India, called the two men pragmatic and able to discuss sensitive subjects without theatre. He said Russia's crude sales to India were setting a new record every month and that he would not give volumes "for understandable reasons." He also said Washington's move to put 100 percent tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil was illegal. India has kept buying. The trade gap is the problem on the Indian side. Officials in New Delhi put the deficit with Russia above $50 billion in 2025-26. They want Moscow to import more Indian goods, not only to sell more barrels.

Defence is the other ledger. Russia is still completing S-400 shipments scheduled for 2026. Both sides have talked about stretching the BrahMos line. The new offer is the Su-57, a fifth-generation aircraft India has studied and not bought. Peskov said Moscow is open to sharing technology tied to the jet. That sentence will be read in Bangalore and in Paris, where other fighter competitions sit. It will also be read in Washington, which has spent years trying to pull India off Russian platforms and which has just expanded tanker strikes against Iran, a BRICS member due in the same hall this weekend.

Energy runs beside the jets. Peskov said Russia is waiting to negotiate new Indian nuclear plants. The two countries already have a long civil-nuclear file at Kudankulam. Fresh reactors would lock in Russian engineers and fuel for decades and would give India megawatts that do not pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a useful fact in a week when Brent has crossed $100 after American strikes on Iranian tankers.

Ukraine will be in the room. Peskov said Russia welcomes India's willingness to help find a settlement and that Moscow's position "broadly corresponded" with New Delhi's line that the war should end through dialogue. That is the language both capitals use when they want to show alignment without describing a plan. Putin has not attended a BRICS summit on foreign soil since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. This trip ends that absence.

The summit itself runs 12-13 September. China has not issued a final public confirmation of Xi Jinping's travel, though Indian diplomatic sources said he is expected on Saturday for a bilateral with Modi the same day. Russia has said it hopes BRICS can narrow the gap between Iran and the United Arab Emirates over the West Asia war when the communiqué is drafted. That hope sits against Friday's war news: five Iranian tankers destroyed, missiles into Jordan, and an IAEA vote sending Iran back to the Security Council.

For India the weekend is a chair's test. The host has to hold a family photograph that includes Russia and Iran while American tariffs and tanker strikes are live. Friday's bilateral is the private hour before that photograph. If it produces a reactor announcement or a Su-57 work plan, the summit will have a deliverable that is bilateral rather than bloc-wide. If it produces only the usual language on currencies and dialogue, the deficit and the oil price will still be there on Monday.