Vladimir Putin arrives in India this week for his second visit to the country in less than a year, and with him are 10 heads of state and government. The Russian president arrives ahead of the 18th BRICS Summit, which is scheduled to open at Bharat Mandapam on September 12, but the meeting that will be under the harshest scrutiny is one day earlier when he sits opposite PM Narendra Modi for a bilateral between the two countries, one Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has already described as covering trade, energy, defence and, inevitably, the war in Ukraine.

It remains to be seen what the two leaders are going to be talking about when they meet again so soon after Bishkek, where Modi had pressed Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit on ending endless wars and war. In the lead up to this visit, Moscow has been very careful to present India as a valid mediator and not a mere bystander.

In a rare move of goodwill to a rival mediator, Peskov told Indian reporters that Russia was glad New Delhi was keen on “helping” bring the conflict to an end, and on the same breath welcomed Washington's return to the fray under a new president, President Trump certainly an olive branch to an adversary.In a gesture of generosity toward a rival mediator, Peskov told Indian reporters that Russia was pleased New Delhi was prepared to help end the conflict, and in the same sentence added that Washington's recent involvement under President Trump is welcomed as well an olive branch to an adversary.

However, most of the space will be taken up by weapons and oil. Russia has stepped up its push to sell India the fifth-generation Su-57 stealth fighter and not only the plane, but also technology transfers and local production as the Indian Air Force faces a shortage that will be filled only when the locally developed Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft is ready, sometime after 2035.

But the reality is that production rights not just finished jets are being sought, and the talks with Moscow are still underway. Peskov has boasted about it enough times that it's almost like a sales pitch but it's not. Russia's Rosatom is eager to develop the Kudankulam plant in Tamil Nadu and is looking into selling smaller, so-called modular reactors to a nation which is aiming to expand nuclear power by three times by the middle of this century.

There, however, is the money, and that is where the two governments have the least latitude to simply wish a problem away.Russia now provides almost half of India's crude oil imports, whereas before 2022 it accounted for only 2.8 per cent of the total demand. It is because of the West's sanctions, which forced Russian barrels at cheaper rates to a market that India could easily swallow, that India became the biggest importer of Russian seaborne crude in the world.

The discount which boosted the profitability of the arrangement for Indian refiners has been declining since April from around $78 a tonne to about $11 a tonne by June, which still makes it a profitable deal from the Indian refiners' perspective, despite the political changes. Washington hasn't been helping. The imposition of new sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil forced several state refiners to temporarily stop buying Russian crude at the end of last year, and a bill in the US Senate would impose up to 100 percent tariffs on the top five buyers of Russian energy. Despite the requirement to pass through the House, the prospect has already made Indian oil companies cautious and diversified their strategies to the Gulf.

The other way trades are even more unbalanced as both governments want it to be better but have not succeeded in making it better. Last full fiscal year on record the bilateral trade was valued at USD 65.7 billion and the difference between exports and imports is significant with India sending USD 4.26 billion worth of goods to Russia and importing USD 61.44 billion, with the majority of it being energy. New Delhi and Moscow have set a goal of raising bilateral trade to $100 billion, but it will take Russia to do more than sell more crude at whatever price the market will bear it will take them to actually purchase more from India in pharmaceuticals, engineering goods, agriculture. For three years in a row, Moscow has been having the better side of the deal, and Peskov himself admits that the imbalance has to be addressed.

All this takes place not in isolation and that's what the summit is all about. The BRICS today are a much larger and more motley crew than the five-country club they formed in 2009 with nearly half the world's population and about 40 percent of global output. It is no longer sung in one voice. Iran's deputy foreign minister has openly admitted that member states could not agree on a common position on the recent conflict over Iran, and with the addition of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia, the bloc has gained members with “genuinely different interests” in the way it is treated in the West. As India assumes chair of the group, its challenge will be to keep that group intact and to pursue the one thing it has not given up since 2022: the purchase of cheap Russian oil with one hand and pursuit of ‘defence and technology ties' with Washington and Brussels with the other.

It is not hypocrisy, as some of the critics in Washington or Kyiv would like to argue. It is closer to what foreign policy realists have been saying for years – that a nation as the size and energy as India can't afford to play any one bloc for outsourcing their decisions, even Western or otherwise. Putin's visit will generate news about fighter jets and peace efforts and both are important.