Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other world leaders are in the Russian city of Kazan for a summit of emerging economies that the Kremlin hopes can become a unifying factor in countering Western influence in international affairs. The forum is largely dominated by the war in Ukraine, agencies note, BTA writes.
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the three-day meeting is an important means of showing the world that efforts led by the United States to isolate his country over its actions in Ukraine have failed, the Associated Press reports.
Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov described the forum as "the most significant foreign policy event" ever organized in Russia. The meeting brings together 36 countries, of which more than 20 will be represented by their heads of state and government. The BRICS group, which originally included Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has grown rapidly in recent times and has welcomed the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia into its ranks. Turkey, Azerbaijan and Malaysia have officially submitted their applications for membership, and several more countries have expressed their interest in becoming members. According to observers, the BRICS meeting is part of the Kremlin's efforts to demonstrate support from the Global South (the former Third World – ed. note) in the face of heightened tensions with the West, and also aims to strengthen financial and trade ties, the Associated Press notes.
Among the proposed projects is the creation of a new payment system that could offer an alternative to the international system for exchanging interbank information SWIFT and allow Moscow to bypass Western sanctions and trade with its partners. Putin, whose program for participation in the forum includes about 20 bilateral talks on the sidelines of the event, met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, who is perhaps the most important guest of the forum. The Russian leader expressed his desire to deepen bilateral ties with Xi, which the Kremlin boss believes could become a driver of global stability, Agence France-Presse reported.
“Russian-Chinese cooperation in international relations can become one of the stabilizing factors on the global stage“, Putin said, adding: “We intend to further strengthen coordination within all multilateral platforms to ensure global security and a just world order“.
The forum underscores the close cooperation between Xi and Putin, who announced a “boundless“ partnership just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. They have previously met twice since the beginning of the year, in Beijing in May and on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Kazakhstan in July. Russian cooperation with India is also flourishing. For Delhi, Moscow has been a time-tested partner since the Cold War, despite Russia's close ties with India's biggest regional rival, China, the Associated Press notes.
Western allies have been pushing Delhi to play a more active role in persuading Moscow to end the war in Ukraine, but Modi has refused to condemn Russia, insisting only on the need for a peaceful settlement of the conflict. "We believe that problems should be resolved peacefully, so we fully support the restoration of peace and stability as soon as possible," said Modi, who last visited Russia in July. Putin hailed the "privileged strategic partnership" with Delhi.
At the meeting with Ramaphosa, the Russian leader stressed that both sides strive for a "fair multipolar world order", and explicitly mentioned the efforts of the BRICS to create a new, independent payment system. At the forum in Kazan, Putin is scheduled to meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who will visit Russia for the first time in two years. The head of the world organization has repeatedly criticized Moscow's actions in Ukraine.
BRICS AND THE WIDER INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
In addition to the war in Ukraine, the meeting in Kazan coincided with that of global financial institutions in Washington, and took place in the context of war in the Middle East, a weakening Chinese economy and concerns that the presidential election in the United States could ignite new trade wars, Reuters notes.
Despite the rapid expansion of BRICS in recent years with the admission of new members, there are concerns that this expansion will make the organization cumbersome and ineffective. China and India, the two largest consumers of Russian oil, have complicated relations, and the Arab members and Iran also have anything but friendly relations with each other, Reuters notes.
Asked by reporters at the forum to comment on the prospects for peace in Ukraine, Putin said Moscow would never cede the four eastern Ukrainian regions that it has declared part of Russia, and added that his country wants others to take into account its security interests in Europe.
Russia, which is currently on the offensive, controls about a fifth of Ukraine's territory, including Crimea, which it seized and unilaterally annexed in 2014, about 80 percent of the Donbass – a coal-mining region consisting of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and over 70% of Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. Putin said the West understood that Russia would win, but added that he was open to negotiations based on the draft ceasefire agreements from Russian-Ukrainian talks in Istanbul in April 2022. On the eve of the BRICS forum, Putin met with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan for informal talks that lasted until midnight at the Russian president's suburban residence in Novo Ogaryovo near Moscow.
Putin praised Sheikh Mohammed and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who will not be present in Kazan, for their mediation efforts on Ukraine, Reuters notes. “We are ready to make all necessary efforts to resolve the crises and in the interests of peace, in the interests of both sides,“ Sheikh Mohammed told Putin. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has canceled his trip to Kazan on the advice of his doctors due to a head injury.
WHAT IS BRICS?
The English acronym BRICS (Brasil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) originates from a 2001 analytical work by the then chief economist of the bank “Goldman Sachs“ Jim O‘Neill, describing the great potential for growth in this century of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Russia, India and China began to organize more frequent official meetings with each other and subsequently included Brazil in the association, then South Africa, and now Egypt, Iran, the UAE and Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia is about to formally become part of the organization.
BRICS is an intergovernmental organization covering 45% of the world's population and 35% of the world economy. The bloc's share of world gross domestic product is expected to rise to 37 percent by the end of the decade, while that of the Group of Seven (G7) economies is expected to shrink from 30 percent this year to about 28 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. With one of Moscow's main goals for the BRICS, namely for the bloc to create its own interbank payments system, it aims to obtain a mechanism that would make it immune to Western sanctions, Reuters notes.