Modi meets Putin and Iran's president ahead of expanded BRICS summit

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in the days before a pivotal gathering of the BRICS bloc—an organization that has just expanded to eleven member nations. The bilateral meetings, held ahead of the larger summit, signaled the intensity of what was shaping up to be a consequential moment for a coalition increasingly positioned as a counterweight to Western economic and political dominance.

Russia came to the table with a clear agenda. Moscow was pushing for the expanded BRICS membership to act as a unified force against what it characterized as Western economic coercion. The Russian government, operating under its own weight of international sanctions, saw in BRICS a potential mechanism for building alternative economic structures and reducing dependence on Western-controlled financial systems. This was not a subtle pitch—it was a direct call for the bloc to organize itself around resistance to external pressure.

Iran brought similar grievances and similar hopes. Like Russia, Tehran has long chafed under Western sanctions regimes and sees in BRICS an opportunity to deepen economic partnerships outside the reach of American and European financial controls. The Iranian delegation used the summit as a platform to argue for stronger economic coordination among member states, framing it as a path toward genuine sovereignty and reduced vulnerability to unilateral Western action.

The timing of these conversations mattered. The world was already fractured along multiple fault lines—geopolitical tensions were escalating in several regions, and the traditional post-Cold War order appeared to be fracturing. BRICS, which began as an acronym for five emerging economies, had grown to encompass eleven nations, reflecting a genuine shift in how power and influence were being distributed globally. The expansion itself was a statement: there were now more countries willing to organize themselves around an alternative to Western-led institutions.

Modi's position in these talks was delicate. India, as the chair of the BRICS summit and a major power in its own right, had to navigate between its own strategic interests and the competing pressures from Russia and Iran on one side and its own complex relationships with Western powers on the other. The bilateral meetings before the larger summit were partly about understanding what each side wanted and what compromises might be possible.

What emerged from these preliminary conversations was a bloc attempting to cohere around economic alternatives. Russia and Iran were explicit: they wanted BRICS to function as a genuine counterbalance to Western economic systems, not merely as a talking shop. They pushed for deeper trade ties, alternative payment mechanisms, and coordinated positions on sanctions and economic policy. The question hanging over the summit was whether the eleven nations could actually agree on such an agenda, or whether their own divergent interests would pull them apart.

The expanded BRICS summit represented something real in the global order—a gathering of nations that collectively represented enormous economic and demographic weight, meeting to discuss how they might operate more independently of Western institutions and constraints. Whether that translates into sustained coordination or dissolves into the usual friction between competing national interests remained to be seen. But the fact that Modi, Putin, and Pezeshkian were having these conversations at all, and that they were doing so as representatives of an organization that had just grown significantly larger, suggested that the architecture of global power was genuinely in motion.