Modi, Putin reaffirm ties as BRICS grapples with Ukraine, Iran tensions

New Delhi was bracing for a delicate diplomatic performance. As the BRICS Summit opened its doors on September 12 and 13, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi faced the task of holding together an alliance that had grown too large and too fractured to speak with one voice. The bloc now represented 3.7 billion people and nearly 40 percent of global GDP—a staggering concentration of economic and political weight. Yet the very expansion that had made BRICS a force to reckon with had also loaded it with contradictions that threatened to splinter it from within.

Modi's first test came in his bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the eve of the summit. The two leaders reaffirmed their "Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership," exchanging views on defense, energy, technology, and people-to-people ties. But beneath the ceremonial language lay a harder conversation. Modi, for the second time in recent months, pressed Putin to pursue negotiations and diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine. The Indian leader had reason to push: Russia's invasion had disrupted shipping in the Black Sea, affecting India's substantial purchases of Russian oil and grain. Indian sailors had been caught in drone attacks. The conflict was no longer a distant European problem—it was damaging Indian interests and Indian lives. Putin, for his part, blamed Western countries for attempting to reclaim their "former leadership" through what he called unseemly means, pointing to the destruction of infrastructure and the seizure of vessels as evidence of economic warfare.

The same evening, Modi met with Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian, whose arrival in New Delhi marked the first visit by an Iranian president to India in over eight years. The meeting carried weight beyond protocol. Iran was under siege—economically strangled by American sanctions that Pezeshkian described as having reached a "critical, dangerous" stage following military aggression by the United States and Israel. Modi, walking a familiar tightrope, called for regional peace and the protection of maritime trade routes, a careful formulation that acknowledged Iran's plight without alienating India's relationships with Israel and the Arab Gulf states. The Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's oil flows, had become a flashpoint of competing blockades.

What made this summit different from the previous year was not just the presence of Putin and Xi Jinping in person—Putin's first in-person attendance at a BRICS summit outside Russia since the 2022 invasion. It was the visible strain of trying to hold the coalition together. When BRICS leaders had met the year before, they could not agree on language regarding either Ukraine or Iran. India, as chair, had issued a chair statement instead of a consensus document—a diplomatic euphemism for failure. Former UN diplomat Shashi Tharoor, speaking to observers, acknowledged that the expansion of BRICS from its original four members to eleven had made it "the voice of the Global South." But he also noted plainly that the chances of consensus had decreased. "BRICS is functioning, but the contradictions remain, and some contradictions have become even more apparent," he said.

The bloc's internal divisions ran deeper than disagreements over distant conflicts. Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal used the BRICS Business Forum to propose linking payment systems across member nations and encouraging trade in local currencies—a direct challenge to dollar dominance. He pointed to India's Unified Payments Interface as a model for cross-border financial cooperation. Yet such proposals masked fundamental disagreements. An alternative payment system and questions about China's dominant role within the expanded bloc threatened to fracture the group's unity. Renewable energy and green infrastructure financing were emerging as areas where consensus might be possible, but they were hardly the transformative initiatives that had drawn nations to BRICS in the first place.

Modi's diplomatic challenge was acute. India's approach, which observers called "America Plus," sought to deepen ties with China and Russia while maintaining relationships with the West and preventing BRICS from becoming an explicitly anti-Western platform. It was a strategy that required constant calibration, constant reassurance to multiple audiences. The expanded bloc now included both Iran, a US adversary, and Egypt and Ethiopia, both strategic partners of the United States. The geopolitical fault lines that ran through the world ran through BRICS as well. As security was intensified across Delhi, with thousands of personnel deployed and schools closed, the real work of the summit would be determining whether this sprawling coalition of the Global South could find common ground on anything more than the abstract principle of multipolarity.