It was an awkward break in summit protocol, as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia chatted for 45 minutes with Prime Minister Narendra Modi inside a bulletproof Russian-made limousine that sat idling while other world leaders waited.

But for Putin, his presidential state car, which he took to China this week as he met with other leaders, was an ideal setting for personal diplomacy, one that his spokesman said offered a “home court advantage”.

In a three-day span, both Modi and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un hitched rides with Putin in his hulking black Aurus limousine.

For Modi, a short drive with Putin during a Eurasian summit meeting on Monday in Tianjin, China, led to their long back-seat conversation. Kim’s turn came on Wednesday, when he rode with the Russian President from a banquet in Beijing to a state guesthouse where they held bilateral talks affirming their countries’ growing ties.

Both drives were eagerly promoted by the Kremlin. The one with Modi, perhaps Putin’s highest-profile passenger yet, was portrayed as a spontaneous decision, though there was enough time to alert the cameras to what amounted to a demonstration of unity between two leaders pushed closer together by President Trump’s diplomatic swerves.

“Just now, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi decided to ride together in one car,” Pavel Zarubin, a journalist with almost unfettered access to the Russian President, said in hushed but excited tones as he panned his cellphone camera from the summit’s red carpet to the waiting limousine.

“This was decided just minutes ago. No one knew about this,” he continued breathlessly, as the two leaders, trailed by a gaggle of reporters, slid into the back seat of Putin’s Aurus.

The car ride was heavily covered by Russian state television and served as an opportunity for Putin to flaunt his warm welcome on the global stage in China three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine left him isolated.

Modi later shared a photo of himself and Putin nestled inside the spacious limo. “Conversations with him are always insightful,” Modi wrote on X alongside a photo of the two men.

Putin has also been on the receiving end of presidential limo rides. Last month in Alaska, President Trump offered Putin a lift in his own armoured car, known as “the Beast”, after giving the Russian President a red-carpet welcome for talks about the war in Ukraine.

At a news conference on Wednesday in Beijing, Putin told journalists he had spoken with Modi about the Alaska summit. According to
the Kremlin, they had previously spoken about the summit by phone, three days after it took place.

For his own “limo diplomacy”, Putin shared a drive last year with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates during a visit to Moscow. He also took the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, for a ride in the Black Sea city of Sochi in 2018, shortly after the Russian-made Aurus limousine was unveiled.

The more recent rides with Modi and Kim indicate how the world has changed since Putin showed President George W. Bush his personal car during a state visit to Russia in 2005. Before dinner at Putin’s private residence, the Russian President let his American counterpart get behind the wheel of his Soviet-era Volga Gaz-21, according to a report at the time by RIA Novosti, an official Russian news agency. As Bush pulled the car up to a group of journalists, he joked that Putin was giving him “driving lessons”.

New York Times News Service