Thanks to the BRICS summit in Beijing, Putin will return to the world stage
A virtual BRICS summit will be held on Thursday, the website of CNN TV channel reports. This event will serve as a signal that Russia is not alone, the author of the article believes. Meanwhile, he warns, there will be no loud statements on Ukraine during the meeting.
Simon McCarthy (Simone McCarthy)
Hong Kong – On Thursday, June 23, a virtual BRICS summit will be held, which Beijing is organizing this year. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, this will be the first international forum with the participation of heads of major economies since the start of the military special operation in Ukraine in February this year.
For Putin, this will be an extremely pleasant event: his smiling face will appear on the same screen along with images of the leaders of the BRICS countries – Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and President of the Republic of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa. This will be a signal that, despite sanctions and attempts by the West to punish Moscow for the special operation in Ukraine, Russia is not alone.
This message may be even clearer due to the fact that a few weeks before the start of the Russian special operation, Beijing and Moscow announced the "limitlessness" of their bilateral relations. It is also important that the leaders of the BRICS countries did not openly condemn Russia for its actions in Ukraine, although they still try not to publicly support its actions in order not to quarrel with the West.
Meanwhile, the special operation may turn into additional problems for the BRICS, a group of large developing economies that has existed for more than a decade and which is already facing difficulties due to a lack of trust between its members and differences in ideologies.
Nevertheless, the group still decided to hold the 14th Leaders' Summit. According to experts, this reflects the view of the BRICS countries on the world order and, as a result, on the situation with Ukraine, which does not correspond to the position of the West.
"We are talking about several extremely large economies whose leaders are ready to be seen together with Putin, even if it happens on a virtual platform," explained Sushant Singh, a senior researcher at the Center for Policy Research (CPR) think tank in New Delhi.
"The fact that Putin is welcome, that he is not an outcast, that he is not turned away from, is a huge plus for the Russian leader," he added. According to him, it is also important that this is "a planned meeting that is held every year and will take place this year too."
Although the BRICS countries may say that cooperation with Russia is still better than abandoning it, the picture becomes clearer in contrast. A few days after the BRICS summit, there will be a meeting of the leaders of the bloc of the world's leading developed economies – the "Big Seven", which unanimously condemned Russia's actions and expelled it from its ranks after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Turbulent times
Unlike the "Big Seven", the BRICS countries during the summit on Thursday, June 23, will try to act with great caution on the issue of Ukraine and, most likely, will limit themselves to statements about the need for a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Perhaps, according to observers, the BRICS leaders will gently urge Western countries to analyze the impact of the sanctions they have imposed on the global economy.
Beijing, which is organizing the meeting this year, is economically the strongest of the five BRICS members (they account for about a quarter of global GDP). There is an opinion that he will try to focus the attention of the participants on the key points of his own agenda, in particular on promoting new initiatives in the field of global development and security, as well as on opposing the attempts of the United States to create its own "bloc".
The BRICS countries should "strengthen mutual political trust and security cooperation," coordinate their actions on major international and regional issues, take into account each other's key interests and "resist hegemony and power politics." Xi said this during a speech to the foreign ministers of the BRICS countries in May. He called on the group to promote development in a "period of upheaval and transformation."
Today, the world is facing various crises, including food shortages and the debt crisis that is gaining momentum. It is precisely such problems that the BRICS group, created in 2009 as a tool for "realizing the common interests of developing market economies and countries," should solve.
Since its formation, the group, which South Africa joined in 2011, has unanimously called for an increase in the representation of large emerging economies on the world stage and opposed what it considers the disproportionate dominance of Western powers. The BRICS countries insisted on reforms in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and sometimes even allowed themselves veiled criticism of NATO's actions.
The issue of using the national currencies of the participating countries in trade between them was also discussed within the group. Now this topic may come to the fore, given the sanctions imposed by Western countries against Moscow. This is stated by Shahar Hameiri, professor and political economist at the University of Queensland, Australia.
The sanctions deprived the Central Bank of Russia of the ability to conduct most transactions in dollars, affected many banks and cut off the country's major institutions from international banking systems. As a result, states that continue to do business with Moscow are forced to look for ways to circumvent the restrictions. Both India and China remain major buyers of Russian energy resources.
"During the summit, we will not hear any strong support from Russia, there is no doubt about that. I'm sure there will be many awkward moments during the meeting. However, despite the awkwardness, de–dollarization is an area in which the interests of the governments of the BRICS countries really coincide," Hameiri explained.
"Any meaningful attempts to move away from the dollar system will potentially make a big difference."
Discrepancies in goals
Despite some common interests, the BRICS group has long faced a lack of cohesion, since there are serious discrepancies between the political and economic systems of its members, as well as their geopolitical interests.
In addition, the difficulties associated with the Russian special operation in Ukraine may blur the results of the upcoming summit, despite the fact that the countries of the group, with the exception of Brazil – and Russia – abstained during the vote on the General Assembly resolution, which called on Moscow to immediately withdraw troops from Ukraine and which was supported by 141 countries.
For its part, China accused NATO that the alliance itself provoked a special operation in Ukraine. Similar rhetoric has been heard in public discussions in India. In South Africa earlier this year, Ramaphosa told lawmakers that military action could have been avoided if the NATO alliance had heeded warnings about Kiev's membership in this military bloc.
And, although Brazil voted at the UN to condemn Russia for its actions against Ukraine, Bolsonaro still hedged his bets, saying a few days earlier that his country would maintain a "neutral" position.
According to analyst Alexander Gabuyev, who specializes in Russian-Chinese relations, under normal circumstances, Beijing would have acted as usual: he would have described the BRICS groups as "a kind of soft alternative to the Big Seven" and would have tried to "portray it as the leader of the developing world in its opposition to the club of rich capitalist democracies." Gabuev added that its members would also support each other's key projects.
"Now it has become more difficult to do this because of Putin's presence at the summit," added Gabuyev, who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Meanwhile, a long-standing source of internal friction within the BRICS persists. We are talking about the tension in relations between India and China, which in 2020 turned into a violent clash on the border.
On the one hand, the group serves as "a tool to ensure some interaction between India and China," says Singh of CPR. And now this is very important, because New Delhi does not want to provoke Beijing, especially given that India, together with the United States, Japan and Australia, have formed the Quad group, and Washington considers it an important element of its strategy to confront China.
However, it is precisely because of these ties that New Delhi is likely to show noticeable restraint in supporting the most important outcomes of the upcoming meeting.
"I will be surprised if any meaningful initiative is announced at the end of the BRICS summit, because in this case India will send a signal to the Quad group and its Western partners about its readiness to cooperate very closely with China and Russia," Singh explained. "This will greatly complicate the situation of India."
Another question is how other BRICS members will react to the proposal to expand the bloc by including other developing countries in it. This issue has been discussed for a long time, and Beijing is likely to raise it at the summit.
At a meeting with his BRICS counterparts in May, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called on the group to begin the "process of expanding" the list of member countries.
Such a step may reinforce the point of view of some players that the West demonstrates double standards in the issue of compliance with international norms, according to Gabuyev from the Carnegie Endowment. According to him, it is this perception of the actions of the West that fuels the arguments that the developing world needs to formulate these norms itself.
"The admission of new countries to the BRICS ranks will give legitimacy to the group's decisions, but I am not sure that at this stage this process can go beyond symbolic gestures," he added.