Putin, Xi and Modi: Why BRICS 2026 Matters Beyond the Summit

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New Delhi is hosting Putin while maintaining an expanding relationship with the West. It is receiving Xi while managing a difficult rivalry with China. It is engaging the Gulf, Russia and the wider Global South while preserving its partnerships across Europe, the Indo-Pacific and North America. The objective is not to choose a camp, but to preserve room for manoeuvre.

For years, BRICS was dismissed as a talking shop. Delhi is beginning to make that dismissal look premature. The people watching BRICS from beyond the corridors of power are not waiting for another grand declaration. Instead, they are waiting for cheaper payments, safer trade routes, reliable energy and fewer choices dictated from elsewhere. This makes the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi more consequential than another gathering of leaders from emerging economies.

Vladimir Putin’s arrival in India, followed by Xi Jinping’s return to Delhi after seven years, has placed Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the centre of a difficult geopolitical equation. Russia is trying to preserve economic and diplomatic space under sustained Western pressure, China is seeking greater influence in a multipolar order, while India is attempting something more complicated: building a multipolar world without replacing one concentration of power with another.

The summit matters less for the photograph of Putin, Xi and Modi together than for what their interaction reveals about the emerging international system.

Delhi Has Always Understood the Politics of Proximity

Delhi has always understood the politics of proximity. Geography may determine who your neighbours are, but diplomacy determines whether those neighbours become liabilities or leverage.

Hence, the importance of Putin’s visit. His presence in New Delhi is not simply another chapter in the longstanding India-Russia relationship. It comes at a moment when Moscow is facing an intensely hostile Western environment, while India continues to maintain close relations with the United States, Europe, Japan and the Gulf.

The resilience of the relationship is visible in places far removed from summit rooms. Moscow says 96% of bilateral trade is now being settled through the rupee and rouble, with most transactions completed within minutes. Whatever the rhetoric around a changing monetary order, this is what strategic autonomy looks like when it leaves the conference room and enters the payment system.

The relationship is also trying to move beyond its traditional dependence on defence and energy. The India-Russia trade target of USD 100 billion by 2030 reflects an attempt to deepen industrial cooperation, investment, technology partnerships and business-to-business engagement. Civil nuclear cooperation, critical minerals, fertilisers and skilled mobility are becoming part of a broader economic conversation.

The presence of Russia’s INNOPROM industrial exhibition in India reinforces that shift. New Delhi and Moscow are not abandoning the old pillars of their partnership, but they are trying to add new ones. Such distinction matters because durable partnerships are rarely built by repeating their history. They survive by finding relevance in changing circumstances.

Putin’s Visit Was Also About a World Under Pressure

The most consequential part of the Modi-Putin engagement was not bilateral at all. Their discussions touched upon conflicts in West Asia and the Black Sea region, including their consequences for maritime trade and the safety of Indian seafarers. Modi again emphasised dialogue and diplomacy as the way forward.

For India, this is not a diplomatic abstraction because a conflict in Europe can affect shipping, fertiliser supplies and food security. Similarly, a crisis in West Asia can threaten energy routes, commercial connectivity and the safety of Indian citizens working across the region. India therefore has little interest in treating global conflicts as distant contests between opposing camps. Its interest lies in keeping enough diplomatic channels open to manage the consequences.

India has always kept reiterating that relationships can survive disagreements, pressure and geopolitical turbulence if national interests continue to overlap.

Putin’s presence gives BRICS tactical weight because Russia remains a major military, energy and diplomatic power. His presence in India also demonstrates that Moscow continues to regard New Delhi as an important diplomatic destination at a time when its room for manoeuvre elsewhere has narrowed. But the bigger story begins when Xi Jinping enters the picture.

Xi Returns to Delhi

Xi’s presence makes the summit far more consequential. The Chinese President’s return to India after seven years comes against the backdrop of the 2020 Galwan clash, an unresolved border question and persistent distrust. Relations have shown signs of stabilisation, but stabilisation should not be confused with resolution.

As Xi returned to Delhi, China Southern announced the resumption of its Delhi-Guangzhou service after a six-year suspension. The border remains unresolved, and mistrust has hardly disappeared, but diplomacy is beginning to rebuild some of the ordinary connections that geopolitics had interrupted.

India and China remain competitors, but their economic interdependence is difficult to ignore. China was India’s largest source of imports in 2025-26, with imports reaching about USD 132 billion. The contradiction is striking. Strategic competition has intensified even as economic dependence remains deeply embedded. This is precisely why Xi’s presence at an India-hosted BRICS summit matters.

During the flagship summit, India and China must demonstrate that rivalry does not have to make cooperation impossible. This is a far more demanding proposition than forming another geopolitical bloc.

BRICS Does Not Have to Become the Next West

BRICS has changed considerably from the economic grouping that first emerged in the 2000s. Its current economic footprint is estimated at about 25% of international trade, while the grouping represents roughly half of the world’s population and around 40% of global GDP in purchasing-power terms. Those numbers alone make it difficult to treat BRICS as a peripheral experiment.

The grouping is discussing payment mechanisms, supply-chain resilience, investment, infrastructure, technology and the wider use of national currencies in trade. The debate over de-dollarisation, however, is often exaggerated into the expectation that BRICS is preparing to replace the dollar overnight. That is neither realistic nor necessary.

The more consequential possibility is the creation of additional channels through which developing economies can trade, invest and settle transactions without becoming excessively vulnerable to disruption in any single financial system. That is economic resilience rather than financial revolution, and India needs this distinction.

BRICS does not have to become the next West. Its real achievement would be ensuring that there is no next West. The objective is not to create another rigid centre of power that demands political alignment from everyone around it. It is to widen the choices available to countries that have spent decades navigating institutions largely shaped by an earlier distribution of global power.

The Global South Wants Choices, Not Camps

Many countries across the Global South do not necessarily want to dismantle the existing international system. They want greater influence within it. They want financial institutions to better reflect contemporary economic realities, developing economies to have a stronger voice in global decision-making, and access to technology, investment and markets without having to permanently choose between competing geopolitical camps. Such aspirations give BRICS its political relevance.

Its diversity, however, is also its greatest complication. India and China remain stringent competitors. Russia remains locked in confrontation with the West. Gulf members have different priorities from Iran. The countries inside the expanded grouping do not share identical positions on conflicts, trade or the future of global governance. However, their diversity is more a boon than a bane.

BRICS must develop mechanisms through which countries with different interests can still cooperate where their interests overlap, which would be a more realistic model of multipolarity than the creation of another alliance system. The grouping's test is therefore not whether Putin, Xi and Modi can stand together for a photograph. It is whether countries that disagree sharply can still build institutions that deliver practical economic value.

India’s Advantage Is A Room for Manoeuvre

That becomes particularly important as the international system fragments into competing economic and security networks. India cannot afford a foreign policy built around permanent alignment because its interests rarely fit neatly inside one camp.

The India-Russia relationship demonstrates that partnerships can survive external pressure. The India-China relationship demonstrates that competition does not erase interdependence. BRICS itself demonstrates that countries do not need to resolve every geopolitical disagreement before cooperating on trade, finance or development.

The world is growing more competitive by the day, but it is not becoming less interconnected. The same countries that disagree over borders, wars and influence remain tied together by trade, energy, technology, shipping and finance. The challenge for India is to make this interdependence work in its favour.

For years, BRICS was judged by whether it could offer an alternative to the existing order. The more consequential question now is whether it can help create a world where alternatives are possible at all. It is a quieter ambition, but perhaps the more transformative one.