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Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service.

We're coming to live from London.

I'm James Menendez.

And coming up in this half hour, we'll be remembering the driving force behind some of the most enduring sole standards of the 1960s.

Steve Cropper, who as well as writing and producing, is also regarded as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

But we are going to begin today in India because in the past hour the Russian president Vladimir Putin has flown

into Delhi for a two-day summit with his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. The two countries have

been close allies for decades, but in recent years, their partnership has been complicated by

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Not because Prime Minister Modi has openly condemned that

invasion, but because the United States under Donald Trump has been putting heavy pressure on

India to stop buying discounted Russian oil. Those sales, it argues, are fueling Russia's

offensive in Ukraine. So, can India square that diplomatic circle? We'll be hearing from a former

Indian ambassador to Moscow in a moment. But first, the BBC's Davina Gupta has been talking

to people in Delhi to find out what they make of today's visit.

I'm in central Delhi and if you spend a few minutes here through the traffic and the winter smog,

you'll spot rows of Indian flags, orange, white, green and blue, flying alongside Russia's colors of red, blue and white.

These flags are darting the street to welcome Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, who is visiting New Delhi for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine.

So how are people here feeling about this visit? Let's find out.

I support Putin's visit to India because I believe that they've been a friend of us for a very long time.

And they've been there even when nobody else was around.

When we had enemies on all sides, they supported us to all sorts of conflicts and even most recently they've

...