Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi this weekend, when the 18th BRICS Leaders' Summit opens at Bharat Mandapam on September 12, Xi's first visit to India in nearly seven years.With it comes the question that has hung over the summit for weeks: Will Modi, Xi and Putin share a frame on Indian soil, days after all three attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Bishkek, and a year after their Tianjin handshake drew global attention? And would it mean anything more this time, at a summit India is hosting?Also read: Xi’s first India trip since 2019 offers olive branch to PM ModiBeijing ended weeks of suspense on Thursday, with China's Foreign Ministry announcing that Xi will attend the summit "at the invitation of Prime Minister of the Republic of India Narendra Modi," his first trip to the country since the informal summit with Modi in Mamallapuram in 2019.Reuters had reported last month, citing two Indian sources, that Xi was likely to come with a delegation of around 400 officials, more than double the contingent that accompanied him in 2019, with Chinese officials already finalising hotels and security arrangements.A three-way appearance would make for a striking image. A formal trilateral, though, is a different matter, and experts see little chance of one.What is firming up instead is a set of bilaterals: Modi meets Putin on Friday, a day before the summit opens, and a Modi-Xi meeting is widely expected on the sidelines.The Tianjin backdropAt the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin last year, Xi told Modi in his opening remarks at their bilateral meeting that it was "the right choice for both sides to be friends... and to have the dragon and the elephant dance together," as reported by ANI.The meeting came weeks after Washington had raised its cumulative tariff on Indian goods to 50 percent over India's Russian oil purchases, and the imagery from Tianjin was widely read as India tilting toward Beijing and Moscow.That backdrop has since shifted. In February 2026, the United States and India announced an interim trade understanding under which Washington dropped the additional 25 percent tariff tied to Russian oil purchases and cut the reciprocal tariff to 18 percent from 25 percent, taking the cumulative rate down to 18 percent from 50 percent. Negotiations on a fuller bilateral trade agreement are continuing.What India wants from its chairshipIndia, chairing BRICS for the fourth time after 2012, 2016 and 2021, has framed its 2026 presidency around the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability," described on the official BRICS 2026 website as a people-centric, "humanity-first" approach first articulated by Modi at the Rio summit in 2025.The priorities listed under India's chairship lean heavily towards practical economic cooperation: resilient supply chains, cross-border payment systems, greater use of national currencies in trade, digital trade, MSME development, energy security, climate resilience and development finance through the New Development Bank, alongside reform of global governance institutions.Also read: The BRICS trade boom has a $226 billion hole for IndiaET Online has previously reported that the most closely watched proposal on the Delhi table is financial: RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra has indicated that BRICS countries are discussing the linking of payment systems and interoperability of central bank digital currencies, infrastructure for settling trade in national currencies, rather than the common BRICS currency that has long attracted speculation.The RIC formatThe Russia-India-China, or RIC, format was first proposed by then Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov during a visit to Delhi in 1998, as a "strategic triangle" to offset a unipolar world order. Its foreign ministers have met more than 20 times since 2002, a figure Russia's current Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has cited while pushing for the format's revival, but leaders have met far less often, last on the sidelines of the G20 in Osaka in 2019.The foreign ministers last met virtually in November 2021, under India's chairmanship, and the format has been dormant at every level since.Moscow has pushed for a revival through 2025 and into 2026, and Beijing has said it is open to the idea. India's position, according to the Ministry of External Affairs, is that a meeting will be worked out "in a mutually convenient manner," language unchanged for over a year.Nandan Unnikrishnan, Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, told ET Online that the caution follows India's own priorities rather than any reluctance to engage. "For India today, the most important task is economic development," he said, adding that India would welcome multilateral projects that bring predictability to its ties with China, without seeking third-party mediation.An RIC meeting was "not likely to see anything spectacular" at any level, he said, but the format remains "a body that India would do well to keep alive instead of consigning it to the ICU."Anushka Saxena, Associate Fellow at the Takshashila Institution, pointed to what RIC lacks next to BRICS itself, which at least has "tangible economic tools, like the New Development Bank and the Contingency Reserve Arrangement, however underused." RIC, by contrast, "has no monetary stakes and no mechanism," she told ET Online.The bilateralsThe Modi-Putin meeting is the only one formally on the schedule so far, and it comes even before the summit opens. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, speaking to reporters in Moscow on Tuesday, confirmed that Modi and Putin will hold a bilateral meeting on Friday, September 11, with defence, trade, nuclear energy and emerging areas of cooperation expected to feature in the discussions, ET Online reported."India has been asking for technology transfer for Su-57 and that is under discussion," Peskov said, adding that cooperation in rare earth exploration is also being discussed and that Moscow is awaiting negotiations with New Delhi on setting up new nuclear power plants. The two leaders, he said, are in "very close personal contact" and able to discuss "the most sensitive issues" of the bilateral agenda openly. A Putin-Xi bilateral is also expected on the sidelines, as per earlier Kremlin statements.A Modi-Xi meeting sits apart from RIC and groundwork for it is already in place. The 25th round of Special Representatives' talks on the boundary question was held in Beijing on August 24-25 between National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, ending in an eight-point statement of outcomes and an agreement to hold the next round in India in 2027.Saxena said a bilateral could build on that with movement on trade through border passes, business visas, flights and pilgrimage access, and possibly a revived memorandum on sharing hydrological data on the Brahmaputra. Breakthroughs on journalist visas or on Chinese export curbs affecting rare earths and fertilisers were unlikely for now, she said.The delegation's size tells its own story, according to Unnikrishnan. With most of the roughly 400 officials expected to be linked to business and economic ministries, he said, Beijing appears to want a "stable and strong economic relationship" with India rather than movement on the political track alone.How Washington reads itJabin T. Jacob, Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies, and Director of the Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies at Shiv Nadar University, said the current US administration places little weight on such distinctions, its attention fixed on the US-China relationship rather than on where India sits within it.Saxena took a more qualified view: the change in India-US ties since February makes Washington likely to be less concerned about the optics from a Delhi summit than it was of Tianjin, though what BRICS agrees to as a bloc, particularly any language read as challenging the dollar's role in trade, would matter more than any photograph.ET Online had previously reported that a stabilised India-China relationship could matter for BRICS well beyond the optics of any Modi-Xi meeting, given that differences between the bloc's two largest Asian members have repeatedly limited its outcomes, including at the Foreign Ministers' meeting in New Delhi in May, which closed without a joint declaration after members could not agree on language covering the West Asia conflict.Days after Bishkek and a year after Tianjin, the three leaders will share a summit again, this time in Delhi. Whether that produces a frame with substance attached is what the next two days will decide.