Modi Meets Putin at BRICS Venue, Xi Bilateral Set for Saturday

Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday afternoon at Bharat Mandapam in Delhi, the venue for this weekend's BRICS summit. The sit-down lasted 45 minutes.

On Saturday evening, at the close of the first day of the summit, Modi is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping. The bilateral comes on Xi's first visit to India in seven years.

Saturday will be busy well before that. From 10 am, the Prime Minister is expected to hold meetings with the leaders of Ethiopia, Malaysia, Abu Dhabi and Vietnam, among others. The Xi meeting, however, is likely to be the most consequential.

Leaders of India and China meet infrequently, and their conversations carry decades of accumulated geopolitical, economic and military tension. This round is no exception. A key focus will be the trade deficit, which has widened sharply since 2019 — from about $11 billion in China's favour to more than $112 billion now, still in China's favour.

A strategic economic dialogue is expected to take up that imbalance and related matters, including access for Indian companies to Chinese markets. The two sides are also expected to review recent discussions in Beijing on the disputed border.

In the Modi-Putin meeting, defence and energy ties were on the table, along with efforts to raise bilateral trade to the $100 billion-by-2030 target. Putin later offered his read on the talks at a BRICS event that evening, saying Russia and its partners are ready to contribute to world energy and food security and to build reliable logistics routes such as the Arctic Transport Corridor.

That reference to reliable logistics routes was read as a reminder that the United States' war on Iran, a BRICS member, remains unresolved. The resulting partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted supply chains, pushed fuel prices up and fuelled cost-of-living crises in several countries.