Putin in Delhi: The War Follows Him Everywhere
Vladimir Putin landed in New Delhi for the BRICS summit carrying the weight of two wars, a recruitment scandal, and an intelligence community that has begun, quietly, to count down his army's remaining months.
Putin in Delhi: The War Follows Him Everywhere
Vladimir Putin landed in New Delhi for the BRICS summit carrying the weight of two wars, a recruitment scandal, and an intelligence community that has begun, quietly, to count down his army's remaining months. It is his first in-person appearance at a BRICS gathering held outside Russian territory since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began — and the symbolism of the location is not incidental. India has spent four years performing a careful neutrality, buying Russian oil at discount, resisting Western pressure to take a side. That balancing act now has a face standing on its tarmac.
The picture in New Delhi is not one of triumph. The Amnesty International report circulating through diplomatic corridors this week describes a recruitment operation built on deception — foreign nationals, many of them economically desperate, lured by fake job advertisements and finding themselves in uniform somewhere near the front lines of eastern Ukraine. Prisoners of war described being handed a rifle where they expected a work contract. It is the detail that geopolitical framing tends to swallow: that Russia's war machine has become, in part, a confidence trick run against the world's most vulnerable people.
Kyiv's spy chief, Lieutenant General Oleh Ivashchenko, offered his own assessment: morale inside Russian ranks is "very low," and nobody, he says, wants to fight. His timeline gives Russia until 2028 before its manpower runs out entirely. Independent analysis of supply chains suggests ammunition and materiel may last only sixteen more months. These numbers exist in the same conversation as 160 drones launched across Ukraine in a single overnight operation — one of which left a mother and her child injured in Zaporizhzhia. The arithmetic of exhaustion has not yet produced silence.
What makes this moment more than another chapter in the same war is the widening frame. NATO officials confirmed that a joint operation successfully disrupted a Russian plan to sabotage undersea data cables — the kind of critical infrastructure that carries the world's financial transactions, communications, and intelligence traffic. Ukraine's military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told Euronews that Europe is "finally waking up" to hybrid warfare as something that happens beyond the Baltic states, and offered Ukraine's hard-won operational experience to allies who are only now beginning to understand the threat. MI5 director-general Sir Ken McCallum went further, writing that Britain now faces greater danger than at any point since 11 September 2001 — a convergence of state-sponsored aggression from Russia and China alongside persistent terrorist threat that he called "the worst of both worlds."
In Delhi, Putin will meet with Modi and with Iran's leadership. The wars are not separate files in these conversations. They are the same file, moving through different rooms.
