Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold their first bilateral meeting in five years on Wednesday, Indian officials said, days after their countries reached a deal on their contested border.

The meeting will take place on the sidelines of the three-day Brics gathering hosted by President Vladimir Putin in the Russian city of Kazan, a sign of a potential thaw between the neighbours since clashes between their troops in 2020.

Around 20 world leaders, including China, India, Turkiye and Iran, are in Kazan, where they will address topics such as developing a Brics-led international payment system and the conflict in the Middle East.

Moscow sees the platform as an alternative to Western-led international organisations like the G7 — a position supported by Xi.

“There will be a bilateral meeting held between Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping […] on the sidelines of the Brics summit,” senior Indian foreign ministry official Vikram Misri said on late Tuesday.

The leaders of the world’s two most populous nations last held face-to-face formal talks when Xi visited Modi in the Indian city of Mahabalipuram in October of 2019.

Months later, in 2020, relations plunged after a skirmish along their contested frontier in the high-altitude Himalayan region of Ladakh, in which at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers were killed.

China and India are intense rivals and have accused each other of trying to seize territory along their unofficial divide, known as the Line of Actual Control.

Since then, both sides pulled back tens of thousands of troops and agreed not to send patrols into a narrow dividing strip.

But India on Monday said that “agreement has been arrived at on patrolling arrangements” with China, easing the military standoff.

Modi and Xi met briefly in Bali in Indonesia on the sidelines of the G20 leaders’ meeting in 2022, and in Johannesburg in South Africa in 2023.

India, however, maintained that ties could not return to normal unless the pre-clash status quo at their Ladakh frontier was restored.

In the last four years, New Delhi made it harder for many Chinese companies to invest in critical Indian sectors, and banned hundreds of Chinese gaming and e-commerce apps, including TikTok.

New Delhi also forged deeper ties with the so-called Quad, a US-led group that includes India, Australia and Japan, and hopes to counter China’s influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

India eased laws for Western companies to invest and co-produce military hardware in the country. Beijing is now expected to push New Delhi to restore economic ties and access for its companies in the fast-growing Indian market.

Xi praises ‘profound’ ties with Russia

In bilateral talks on Tuesday, including with Xi and Modi, Putin hailed Moscow’s close ties and “strategic partnerships” with its partners.

Xi, meanwhile, praised China’s “profound” ties with Russia in what he called a “chaotic” world.

Russia and China’s relations have “injected strong impetus into the development, revitalisation and modernisation of the two countries”, Xi said.

Putin said he saw relations between Beijing and China as a foundation of global “stability.”

“Russian-Chinese cooperation in world affairs acts as one of the stabilising factors in the global arena. We intend to further increase coordination in all multilateral platforms to ensure global security and a just world order,” he told Xi.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also arrived in Russia on Wednesday to attend the Brics summit, his first visit to the country for more than two years that has drawn scorn from Ukraine.

The gathering is the largest diplomatic forum in Russia since launching its full-scale military offensive on Ukraine in 2022 and Putin wants to use it to demonstrate that attempts to isolate him on the world stage have failed.