Kremlin Confirms: Vladimir Putin to Visit New Delhi for BRICS Summit in September
This will be the first visit of Putin to India this year, and second within a year.
New Delhi:Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit New Delhi for the BRICS leaders summit on September 12-13, the Russian Embassy in South Africa posted on X on Tuesday, citing Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov. This is the first official confirmation by the Russian side of Putin’s visit.
This will be the first visit of Putin to India this year, and second within a year. He had visited New Delhi five months ago for the annual bilateral summit between the two nations in December last year.
After Putin visits New Delhi in September, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit Russia by the end of this year for the annual bilateral summit.
“We are preparing for the BRICS summit. Prime Minister Modi yesterday (Monday) reaffirmed that this year it's his turn to make a visit to the Russian Federation. We will be preparing for this top-level summit”, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was quoted as stating in New Delhi just last week on the sidelines of the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting (FMM).
The 11 member-nation BRICS grouping comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa besides relatively new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia who joined the grouping in the past two years. However, Saudi Arabia has been associated with the grouping only in a very limited capacity.
Modi had last week “reiterated India’s consistent stand of dialogue and diplomacy as the best way forward” to resolve global conflicts when the Russian Foreign Minister had called on and briefed him at a meeting “on the progress achieved in bilateral cooperation and had “exchanged views on the situation in Ukraine and West Asia”.
India-Russia ties are like the pole star and have stood the test of time, Modi had said last December in the Capital after talks with Putin at the Hyderabad House. The two leaders discussed strengthening of ties in a wide range of sectors such as trade, defence, agriculture and food security including manufacture of urea and long-term supply of fertilisers, energy security, connectivity, culture, people to people exchanges and tourism.
Modi also hailed the Russian leader’s contribution in the past two and a half decades to bilateral ties. In a strong message to the West amid steep American tariffs on India for importing Russian oil, the Prime Minister had termed “energy security” as a strong and important pillar of the India-Russia partnership.
