Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi arrived in New Delhi to join thirteen world leaders at the eighteenth BRICS Summit, which formally opens its core proceedings today under India’s chairship. The two day gathering brings together heads of state and senior officials from BRICS member nations, partner countries, and major international organizations, with Sisi scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the summit sidelines.
Sisi’s visit marks his first trip to India since attending the G20 Leaders’ Summit back in September 2023, giving today’s engagement particular significance given the relatively limited direct contact between the two leaders over the past year and a half, aside from a brief pull aside meeting at a G7 gathering earlier this year. Egypt and India elevated their relationship to a formal strategic partnership in 2023, the same year Sisi served as chief guest at India’s Republic Day celebrations, underscoring the historically warm ties between the two nations.
The broader summit has drawn a genuinely global roster of leaders to New Delhi, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and Vietnamese Prime Minister Le Minh Hung, among numerous other heads of state and government. That scale of participation reflects BRICS’ continued expansion and growing influence as a platform for coordinating positions among major emerging economies.
Putin’s presence carries its own significant weight, marking his first in person participation at a BRICS summit held outside Russia since the war in Ukraine began in 2022. The Russian leader arrived accompanied by a substantial delegation and is scheduled to hold a series of bilateral meetings during his three day visit, including sessions with Ramaphosa, Anwar Ibrahim, and Sisi himself, alongside his primary engagement with Modi covering trade, investment, energy cooperation, and defense matters.
New Delhi has positioned this year’s summit around strengthening collective resilience across food security, energy, health, disaster reduction, and critical supply chains, framing the BRICS bloc as an effective anchor for navigating an increasingly fragmented global geopolitical environment. That framing reflects growing ambition among BRICS members to position the grouping as a genuine counterweight to traditional Western dominated international institutions and forums.
For Egypt specifically, participation in this expanded BRICS format offers continued opportunity to deepen economic and diplomatic ties with major emerging economies beyond its traditional Western partnerships. Egypt formally joined BRICS as a full member in 2024, and this year’s summit gives Cairo another platform to advance discussions around trade diversification, investment attraction, and coordinated positions on regional security matters affecting the broader Middle East.
Ahead of the main summit sessions, a BRICS Business Forum brought together roughly two thousand delegates, including significant representation from Indian companies alongside hundreds of international business leaders, reflecting the summit’s growing commercial dimension alongside its more traditional diplomatic and political proceedings. Business leaders attending have used the forum to explore new partnership opportunities across the expanding BRICS economic space.
As the two day summit proceeds through its formal sessions today and tomorrow, attention will focus on what joint declarations or concrete cooperation agreements emerge from the gathering, along with the substance of Sisi’s bilateral discussions with Modi and other counterparts on the sidelines. For Egypt, this high profile participation reinforces the country’s broader strategy of engaging major international blocs and individual powers simultaneously, building relationships across multiple geopolitical groupings rather than concentrating its diplomatic energy on any single set of partners.
