Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian arrived in New Delhi this week for the 18th BRICS summit, a gathering overshadowed by the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine that has exposed growing strain within the 11-member bloc’s expanded and increasingly divided membership.
What Happened
Putin and Pezeshkian arrived in New Delhi Friday for talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of the September 12-13 summit, with China’s Foreign Ministry confirming Xi’s attendance after days of diplomatic uncertainty, marking his first visit to India since 2019. The visit represents the biggest step yet in a cautious thaw between the two countries, six years after a deadly military clash along their disputed Himalayan border.
India has navigated the energy disruption caused by the war on Iran partly by turning to Russia, one of its most important strategic partners and its most controversial fuel supplier, even as Moscow’s own war against Ukraine continues without resolution. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar visited Kyiv earlier this month, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was “grateful to India for its commitment to ending this unjust war,” illustrating the delicate balancing act New Delhi continues to manage across multiple competing relationships.
Harsh V. Pant of India’s Observer Research Foundation described the widening Gulf conflict as “going to be the central fault line” of this year’s gathering, noting that BRICS’s recent expansion to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, three countries with sharply differing positions on the war launched by the US and Israel, has transformed what was once seen as a major achievement into what he called “a big constraint on BRICS.”
Why It Matters
The summit’s timing, occurring as fighting between the US and Iran has widened significantly in recent days and as Houthi forces have made major territorial gains in Yemen, places Pezeshkian’s presence in New Delhi under particular scrutiny, given the direct relevance of ongoing Iranian diplomacy to a conflict that continues to drive global oil prices and regional instability.
BRICS’s expanded 11-member structure, created in part to offer emerging economies a platform independent of Western-dominated institutions, faces a genuine test of its practical cohesion given how sharply member states’ interests diverge on the Gulf conflict specifically, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE maintaining complex, often tense relationships with Iran even within the same multilateral forum.
For India specifically, hosting leaders with such divergent positions on active global conflicts underscores the country’s continued strategic balancing act, maintaining relationships with Russia, Iran, the United States, and Ukraine simultaneously in ways that reflect New Delhi’s broader foreign policy approach of avoiding firm alignment with any single bloc.
Context and Background
BRICS was created in 2009 as a forum for major emerging economies seeking greater influence in international institutions historically dominated by Western powers, expanding significantly in recent years to include additional members beyond its original core of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Putin last visited India in December 2025, though he also met Modi earlier this month on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, reflecting the frequency of high-level engagement between the two countries even amid Russia’s prolonged war in Ukraine and Western sanctions targeting Moscow.
The summit’s agenda is expected to address wars in the Middle East and Ukraine alongside global trade turbulence and oil market instability, reflecting how directly the current period of overlapping international conflicts has come to dominate the bloc’s discussions beyond its traditional focus on economic and development cooperation.
Analysis
Diplomatic analysts note that the presence of Xi, Putin, and Pezeshkian together in New Delhi offers a notable snapshot of the current alignment among countries maintaining more distant or adversarial relationships with Washington, even as India itself continues seeking to preserve its own separate, complex relationship with the United States alongside its BRICS commitments.
Some regional observers point to Pant’s characterization of BRICS’s expansion as now constraining rather than strengthening the bloc as reflecting a broader challenge facing multilateral institutions generally when membership expands to include states with genuinely conflicting strategic interests, a dynamic that could shape debates about further BRICS expansion going forward.
Foreign policy analysts caution that while symbolic displays of unity among BRICS leaders carry diplomatic significance, the summit’s ability to produce concrete, actionable outcomes on either the Iran or Ukraine conflicts specifically remains limited given the fundamental disagreements among member states about how to address both wars.
What Happens Next
The two-day summit’s formal proceedings will be closely watched for any joint statements or declarations addressing the Gulf and Ukraine conflicts, though the scale of internal disagreement among members suggests strongly worded, unified positions on either war remain unlikely. Bilateral meetings between Modi and individual leaders, including Putin, Xi, and Pezeshkian, are expected to continue alongside the formal summit sessions.
Continued scrutiny of India’s balancing act across its various strategic relationships is likely to persist beyond the summit itself, given the country’s demonstrated pattern of maintaining engagement with multiple parties to ongoing global conflicts simultaneously.
