The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, will hold its first in-person summit after the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. The event is being hosted in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on September 15-16th.

Launched in Shanghai in June 2001, the SCO has eight full members, including its six founding members, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

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World leaders like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will be attending the summit. The leaders will huddle after more than 2 years.

The last in-person SCO summit was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in 2019. After that, the 2020 Moscow summit was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while the 2021 summit at Dushanbe was conducted in a hybrid mode.

While India and Pakistan joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2017, it still has some observer states and dialogue partners. These include Afghanistan, Belarus, Mongolia, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey. Armenia and Azerbaijan, which recently engaged in a conflict, are also on the list.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit will also mark the second recent expansion of the organisation as Iran will be formally admitted into the influential Central Asian group, news agency PTI reported.

The spotlight is likely to be on four countries: Russia, China, India and Pakistan. The Kremlin confirmed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will be having a private meeting. The announcement comes as both countries share strained relations with the west.

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Putin and Xi will hold a one-on-one meeting Thursday and discuss Ukraine ahead of the next day’s security summit, the Russian president’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters in Moscow.

New Delhi, however, has not confirmed any scheduled meetings that Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have with other world leaders.