News Mania / Piyal Chatterjee / 22nd October 2024
In a show of force against the West, Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to host two dozen world leaders at the Brics Summit in Kazan.
Putin is interested in using the Brics Summit to demonstrate that Western efforts to isolate Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, aggression against Europe, and conflict with the United States are failing. While Russia was at war with Ukraine in 2022, the Brics Summit would be the largest international assembly to take place in Russia.
Western commentators have viewed the Brics group of rising economies as a challenger to the G-7 and other Western organizations. Brics has long been positioned by China and Russia as essential to their creation of the new global order. Although the organization was originally called Brics because it included Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, it has now grown to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
On the fringes of the summit, Putin will meet bilaterally with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is also possible that Modi and Xi will meet once the border agreement is announced.
China and Russia have been attempting to overthrow the West and create a new global order for years. A key component of the vision has been Brics. According to AFP, Putin is expected to advocate for a BRICS-led payment system at the Brics Summit 2024 to compete with SWIFT, a global banking network that Russian banks were excluded from in 2022 due to the invasion of Ukraine. With the Brics Summit in Kazan, Putin “aims to show that not only is Russia not isolated, it has partners and allies”, Moscow-based political analyst Konstantin Kalachev told AFP.
Ahead of the summit, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov dubbed Brics as a “prototype of multipolarity”. “We believe that BRICS is a prototype of multipolarity, a structure uniting the Southern and Eastern hemispheres on the principles of sovereignty and respect for each other. What BRICS is doing is gradually —brick by brick— building a bridge to a more democratic and just world order,” said Ushakov, as per AFP.
Russia is a member of the authoritarian bloc that has been assisting each other in its conflicts and undermining the democratic West, along with China, Iran, and North Korea. China, North Korea, and Iran are providing Russia with consumer products, weapons, and armed drones as part of their attack on Ukraine. In a similar vein, Russia is arming Iran’s proxy in West Asia to fight Israel. Russia views the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Brics as a continuation of the bloc’s attempts to subvert the West and establish a new global order.
