Putin lands in Delhi for a three-day visit and a 3.30pm meeting with Modi
His first in-person BRICS summit outside Russia since February 2022, and his second meeting with Modi in eleven days.
Vladimir Putin landed in New Delhi on Friday morning at the start of a three-day visit, and will sit down with Narendra Modi at 3.30pm for the second meeting between the two leaders in under a fortnight.
It is Putin's first in-person appearance at a BRICS summit held outside Russia since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022 — a detail that says as much about where Russia can travel comfortably as it does about the summit itself.
The welcome
The Russian president was received at the airport by the Minister of State for External Affairs, K V Singh, and arrived with a high-level delegation.
"Warmly welcome President Vladimir Putin of Russia for the 18th BRICS Summit," the Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal, wrote on X. Putin "was received by MoS K V Singh at the airport", he added, and the two countries "share multifaceted and longstanding ties anchored in Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership".
The Kremlin has described the trip as a working visit rather than a state visit — the classification that signals business over ceremony.
What Friday's meeting is about
The bilateral is scheduled to cover strategic trade resilience, cross-border payment mechanisms, energy security, and conflict-resolution pathways on the tensions in Eastern Europe and West Asia.
That is a compact agenda with one unifying theme: how two countries keep trading when the financial plumbing between them runs through jurisdictions that may not want them to.
Bilateral trade stands at roughly $60 billion, driven heavily by discounted crude oil imports, and both governments are targeting $100 billion by 2030. Getting from one figure to the other is less about finding new goods to trade than about settlement — which is why cross-border payments sit on the agenda of a leaders' meeting rather than a technical committee.
Putin will also address the BRICS Business Forum.
Two meetings in eleven days
The pace of contact is the part worth noting. Modi and Putin met at the SCO summit in Bishkek on 31 August, where Modi renewed the BRICS invitation in person. Eleven days later they are meeting again in Delhi.
This is also Putin's second visit to India inside a year, following the annual bilateral summit in New Delhi in December 2025.
For a leader whose travel has been constrained since 2022, that frequency is a statement about which relationships remain available to Moscow — and India's willingness to host it twice in ten months is a statement of its own, made while New Delhi also manages relationships with Washington and the Gulf.
The summit he has come for
The leaders' summit proper opens at Bharat Mandapam on Saturday and runs for two days, bringing together the eleven member states, partner countries and outreach invitees.
India is positioning the agenda around collective resilience — food, energy, health, disaster reduction and critical supply chains — with the bloc presented as an anchor in a fragmented geopolitical environment.
That framing is doing deliberate work. Resilience is a subject on which eleven countries with sharply different alignments can agree, at a summit where the paragraph on the war in West Asia is still being negotiated between members who are on opposing sides of it.
The rest of Friday
The Kremlin has published its own account of the day, and it contains an engagement the Indian readouts have not emphasised.
Putin would address "the plenary session of the annual BRICS Business Forum", the statement said, a platform that "traditionally precedes the summit" and serves business representatives from BRICS countries. On the same day he would hold the bilateral with Modi and, "together with him, visit the INNOPROM exhibition, organised by the two countries' ministries of industry and trade".
INNOPROM is a trade exhibition run jointly by the Russian and Indian industry and trade ministries, and the two leaders touring it together is the part of the day aimed at the $100 billion target rather than at the communiqué. The Kremlin also framed the trip around the grouping's twentieth anniversary.
What the bilateral cannot settle
Two things about Friday's meeting are worth keeping in proportion.
The first is that an agenda item on conflict-resolution pathways for Eastern Europe is not a negotiation about Ukraine. India is not a party to that war and has no mandate in it; what it can offer is a channel, not a settlement.
The second is the trade target. Doubling trade to $100 billion by 2030 from a base built substantially on discounted crude assumes both the discount and the demand persist. Brent crude passed $100 a barrel this week, and the economics that made Russian oil attractive to Indian refiners are a function of a price gap rather than of the relationship.
Neither of those qualifications is likely to feature in whatever statement follows the meeting. What will be visible by Friday evening is narrower: whether anything was signed, and what the two governments chose to announce.
