Delhi Summit

Vladimir Putin arrived in Delhi on Friday for an 11-member BRICS summit that will be dominated by the wars in Iran and Ukraine. He was greeted at Palam air force station by India's minister of state for external affairs, Kirti Vardhan Singh, according to footage broadcast by Russia's Ria Novosti news agency.[1]

Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian is also attending, making his first visit to India as president. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected too, in what would be his first visit to India since 2019. The summit is the biggest step yet in a cautious thaw between the rival neighbours, six years after a deadly military clash along their disputed Himalayan border. Flights, visas, and high-level contacts between the nuclear-armed Asian giants have been gradually restored, though deep mistrust remains.[2]

BRICS was created in 2009 as a forum for major emerging economies seeking greater influence in institutions dominated by Western powers. It has since expanded to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, three countries with sharply differing positions on the war launched by the US and Israel against Iran in February. That expansion, once celebrated as an achievement, now looks like a liability.[3]

"The Gulf conflict is going to be the central fault line this time during the BRICS summit," said Harsh V Pant of India's Observer Research Foundation. "What was seen until last year as an achievement, the expansion of BRICS, today looks like a big constraint on BRICS."[4]

The fault line is already visible. BRICS foreign ministers failed to agree on a joint statement when they met in Delhi in May. The expanded bloc now includes both Iran and its regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, each with their own interests in the war. Adding a member with an active war on its territory has made consensus harder, not easier.[5]

India occupies a delicate position. It maintains cordial relations with both Iran and Israel, while carefully managing ties with Washington. It has navigated the energy crisis caused by the Iran war in part by turning to Russia, one of its most important strategic partners and its most controversial fuel supplier as the war against Ukraine drags on. India's foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, visited Kyiv this month, when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was "grateful to India for its commitment to ending this unjust war."[6]

Putin last visited India in December 2025. He also met Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, earlier this month. The two-day summit will test whether BRICS can produce a joint declaration with members on opposite sides of an active conflict, or whether the expansion that was meant to signal the group's growing power instead exposes its inability to agree on anything that matters.[7]