Shehbaz Sharif becomes meme material yet again, enters Putin’s meeting uninvited after 40-minute wait and leaves unnoticed | WATCH

Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on September 25, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif managed to draw global attention at an international forum in Turkmenistan on December 12, though not for the reasons he might have hoped. Sharif was scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the event marking the 30th anniversary of Turkmenistan’s permanent neutrality. Instead, he walked straight into a closed-door meeting between Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after his own bilateral was delayed.

A video shared by RT India captured the spectacle. After waiting with Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar in an adjacent room for nearly 40 minutes, an increasingly restless Sharif marched into the meeting venue hoping he could at least secure a brief handshake with Putin. Instead, he walked in on Putin’s discussion with Erdogan, remained inside for about 10 minutes, and then quietly exited. The visuals quickly made their way online, giving users fresh material for ridicule. One user on X posted, "Putin does not want to waste his time on beggars," while another wrote, "Even Trump did the same with these beggars."

❗️The Moment PM Sharif Gate-crashed Putin's Meeting With Erdogan After Waiting For 40 Mins https://t.co/r4L9XhA9IYpic.twitter.com/shi7YLMgmP

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) December 12, 2025

For Sharif, this kind of diplomatic awkwardness is nothing new. His attempts to appear relevant on the world stage have repeatedly fallen flat. At the SCO Summit earlier this year, he was widely mocked for awkward handshakes, misplaced positioning during photo ops and struggling to get attention from global heavyweights like Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. As Moneycontrol noted, these moments exposed how Sharif often appears out of sync with the stature of other leaders at multilateral forums.

The latest episode in Turkmenistan has only fuelled that perception. Instead of a confident statesman engaging in high-level diplomacy, Sharif once again appeared as a leader scrambling for visibility, only to stumble into yet another embarrassing situation.

The forum itself was meant to celebrate Turkmenistan’s officially recognised permanent neutrality, which was endorsed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly on December 12, 1995. The status commits the Central Asian nation to staying out of military alliances, limiting involvement in conflicts to self-defence, and generally prohibiting foreign military bases on its territory.

Yet despite the significance of the event, it was Sharif’s unintended walk-in that became the highlight of the day. Social media users summed it up bluntly: while Putin and Erdogan discussed real geopolitics, Sharif was once again left knocking at the wrong door.