Need a lift? Putin takes his ‘limo diplomacy' to China

It was an awkward break in summit protocol, as President Vladimir Putin of Russia chatted for 45 minutes with his Indian counterpart 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 spokesperson said offered a “home court advantage.”

In a three-day span, both Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India 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 Monday in Tianjin, China, led to their long back-seat conversation. Kim’s turn came 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 Donald 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 social platform 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 Donald Trump offered Putin a lift in his own armored 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 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-Sissi, for a ride in the Black Sea city of Sochi in 2018, shortly after the Russian-made Aurus limousine was unveiled.

In February 2024, Putin gave an Aurus car to Kim, the North Korean leader, as a birthday present. A few months later, during a state visit to Pyongyang, both men took turns behind the wheel of a different Aurus vehicle gifted by Putin. At the time, the Kremlin released a video of Putin in the driver’s seat, making jokes as Kim smiled next to him. Experts say the gifts were a breach of United Nations sanctions against Pyongyang.

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.” That drive came after the two leaders rode in Bush’s white pickup truck around the U.S. president’s ranch in Texas in November 2001.

In the 1990s, Kremlin leaders were mostly driven around in Mercedeses and other Western-made vehicles. As Russia’s economy boomed in the early 2000s, luxury cars from the West were in high demand in Moscow and could be regularly seen zipping along the capital’s wide boulevards.

Russian company Aurus started developing a luxury car for the president in 2013. Porsche and Bosch helped develop the vehicle’s engine, according to media reports published when the car was unveiled in 2018. The vehicle was immediately branded in Russia as “our Rolls-Royce.”

Each model of the luxury Aurus Cortege series is named for a tower in the Kremlin. Putin’s armored Senat limousine is named for the 15th-century Senate Tower.

The car was first used in public when Putin returned to the presidency in 2018 and made its first foreign trip the same year for a summit in Helsinki, Finland, between Putin and Trump.

The cars have been available for commercial purchase since 2021. An Aurus Senat starts at 48.5 million rubles, or about $600,000, according to the carmaker’s website.