BRICS opens in New Delhi with Putin, Xi and Pezeshkian in the room and a war overhead

Chinese President Xi Jinping joined the leaders of Russia, Iran, India and other BRICS nations in New Delhi on Saturday, seeking common ground, Agence France-Presse reported¹. Xi landed in India for a summit overshadowed by war, with leaders from India, Russia and Iran present as wars, trade and energy dominated the agenda⁸. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had already been welcomed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi³.

At the summit, China, Russia and India urged maximum restraint in the Middle East². Modi stood alongside Xi and Putin during the eighteenth BRICS gathering². The Guardian reported that Xi received a red-carpet reception amid a thaw in India-China relations³.

Why it matters to investors

The sharpest economic language came from Putin. He told the BRICS Business Forum that Russia has been hit by more than 30,000 sanctions, which he said was twice the number imposed on all other countries combined^5,6. He accused Western governments of abandoning the free-market principles they once promoted, and of using sanctions, secondary sanctions and measures against vessels⁴.

Putin also singled out the threat of so-called secondary sanctions against countries that refused to follow the interests of other powers⁶. That is the mechanism that reaches beyond the sanctioned country and into the banks, insurers and buyers that deal with it, which is why the phrase matters to firms with no Russian exposure of their own. TRT World reported the same claim, that more than 30,000 sanctions had been imposed on Russia⁵.

What to watch

The communique was still unsettled late in the day. BRICS negotiators worked into the evening to find consensus for a Delhi Declaration, with language covering Israel and Iran’s attacks on installations in the United Arab Emirates and other West Asian countries still unresolved, The Hindu reported⁷. A bloc that includes Iran and the Gulf at the same table has to write around that split rather than through it.

For investors the readable outputs are narrow but concrete: whether the final declaration names the Middle East attacks directly⁷, whether the restraint language is matched by anything operational², and whether the India-China thaw on display in Delhi survives past the summit³. Agence France-Presse framed the whole exercise as a search for common ground rather than a settled position¹.