Putin arrives in India for BRICS summit amid Middle East and Ukraine tensions

Vladimir Putin stepped onto the tarmac at Palam Air Force Station in New Delhi on Friday, greeted by India's Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh. He had arrived for an 11-member BRICS summit that would spend two days wrestling with the wars reshaping the Middle East and Ukraine, alongside the economic fractures running through the global order.

The gathering itself had become a study in contradiction. BRICS began in 2009 as a coalition of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—designed to challenge Western dominance of international institutions. It has since swallowed nine more members, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. That expansion, celebrated as a victory just months ago, now looked like a liability. The three Gulf states held fundamentally incompatible positions on the American-Israeli war against Iran that had begun in February. Harsh V Pant, an analyst at India's Observer Research Foundation, put it plainly: the Gulf conflict would be the central fault line of the summit. What had seemed like an achievement of statecraft now appeared to constrain the group's ability to act.

Putin's presence underscored the tangle. He was there to meet with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as was Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian—making his first visit to India in the role, and his first to the country in eight years. China's President Xi Jinping was also expected to meet Modi on the margins. The bilateral choreography mattered as much as the plenary sessions. India had to hold steady between Iran and Israel, maintaining cordial relations with both while managing a delicate balance with Washington. The energy crisis triggered by the war on Iran had pushed India closer to Russia, one of its most important strategic partners, even as Moscow's invasion of Ukraine continued. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar had visited Kyiv earlier in the month, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked India for its commitment to ending what he called an unjust war. The contradictions were not rhetorical; they were structural.

New Delhi itself had been transformed for the occasion. Posters of Modi lined the streets. Security forces deployed across the capital. Traffic restrictions choked central districts. Delhi police asked residents for patience and cooperation. The machinery of state had shifted into high gear to manage the arrival of these leaders and the weight of the conflicts they carried with them.

For Xi, the visit marked his first return to India since 2019—a significant thaw between two nuclear-armed rivals. Six years earlier, a deadly military clash along their disputed Himalayan border had frozen relations. Since then, flights, visas, and high-level contacts had been gradually restored. Yet the warming was cautious and incomplete. Deep mistrust persisted. The contested frontier remained contested. India's trade deficit with China continued to widen. Strategic rivalry still complicated every interaction. Xi's presence in New Delhi was less a resolution than a tentative step toward one.

The BRICS foreign ministers had met in New Delhi in May and failed to produce a joint statement. That failure hung over the summit. Shilan Shah, an analyst at Capital Economics, saw the war in Iran as a stern test of whether the expanded group could hold together at all. The summit would reveal whether BRICS could function as anything more than a gathering of states with incompatible interests, or whether it would fracture along the very fault lines it was meant to transcend.