A meeting between the two leaders comes just two days after they settled a tense border dispute in the Himalayas.
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India met officially for the first time in more than five years on Wednesday at a summit of emerging market countries in Russia, setting the stage for a potential thaw between the two Asian powers.
The session came two days after China and India reached a deal on patrolling their shared Himalayan border, the site of a deadly clash between Chinese and Indian forces in 2020. Relations between Beijing and New Delhi have been frosty ever since, with India drawing closer to the United States through a regional security grouping called the Quad.
Mr. Xi and Mr. Modi are attending the 16th annual BRICS summit, a group of non-Western countries whose acronym stems from its earliest members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It expanded this year to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, growing to represent almost half the world’s population.
Established as a counterweight to U.S.-led forums like the Group of 7 and intended to give developing countries more influence, BRICS has struggled to speak with a unified voice. That, in no small part, is because of the competing interests of its two biggest members.
China wants to use the grouping to weaken the dominance of the United States and burnish its credentials as a leader of the so-called Global South. India also claims leadership of the Global South, but unlike China, does not want BRICS to develop into an explicitly anti-Western body.
During a round table session earlier on Wednesday, the leaders discussed a range of issues, including creating financial platforms outside the reach of the U.S. dollar. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia offered a proposal to create a BRICS grain exchange that could evolve into a commodities exchange. Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, and its war in Ukraine, another top grain exporter, sent prices soaring in 2022.
