It is fair to assume that everyone was meeting with everyone in and around the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summits in Tianjin over Aug. 31 and Sept. 1. Not just the kind of often-important, face-to-face discussions that take place in hallways or over lunch at such events, but also substantial sit-down bilateral meetings, some including the delegations accompanying each head of state. EIR assumes the following reports do not cover half of these meetings.
There was at least one trilateral meeting. Today, China’s President Xi Jinping, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh met together (their seventh such meeting), at which one (of several) leading items on their agenda was the development of the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor program.
Some were “biggies,” with one of the biggest being the [meeting of President Xi Jinping-Prime Minister Narendra Modi](https://eir.news/2025/09/news/india-and-china-are-development-partners-not-rivals-says-indias-ministry-of-external-affairs/. The Xi and Putin meetings, first with their accompanying ministers and then privately, also merits a separate item elsewhere in today’s EIR News report.
Putin-Modi discussions were also extensive. The Indian and Russian leaders held an official bilateral after the SCO meeting, joined by no less than 15 top Russian officials, ministers, heads of companies and an equivalent number accompanying Modi. “We are constantly in contact, and high-level meetings between our sides are held regularly. In December of this year, 1.4 billion Indians will eagerly welcome you to India for the 23rd annual summit between our countries,” Modi told Putin in opening those discussions.
But before that meeting took place, the short ride from the SCO site to the meeting site that the two leaders took in Putin’s limousine ended up lasting “close to 50 minutes,” as the two stayed talking long after they had arrived. Kremlin Presidential Secretary Dmitry Peskov explained that “when there’s an important discussion going on, there’s simply no time to break away for transitions, travel, and so on. They feel comfortable there, and so they continued to communicate. But the agenda is really more than full.” Modi posted the well-publicized photograph of the two leaders smiling at the camera from the limo to his X account, with his comment, “Conversations with him are always insightful.”
Xinhua has reported on President Xi’s separate meetings with the heads of state of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Iran, Türkiye, Azerbaijan, and Malaysia, minimally.
Kremlin readouts are posted for at least nine other bilaterals with Putin between Aug. 31 and Sept. 2, with the heads of state and government of Türkiye, Iran, Vietnam, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Nepal, and today, with the two European leaders in Beijing for the Sept. 3 celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the victory over fascism and Japanese militarism: Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic and Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico.
