Putin puts on a show for BRICS

Last week's BRICS summit in Kazan was probably the most successful international event hosted by Vladimir Putin since the start of the war. This is the largest diplomatic forum, with the largest number of world leaders, since at least 2022. Despite the spectacle that Putin managed to put on and the twenty or so foreign leaders he managed to attract, he There have been no concrete steps toward Russia's biggest goal: establishing an international payments system independent of Western banks.

• Putin achieved his main political goal through the BRICS summit, showing that Russia is not completely isolated, while annoying the West, as Western media reported (1, 2). This summit was the most truly representative forum organized by Russia since the start of the war. Among the group's old guard, China's Xi Jinping, India's Narendra Modi and South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa all came to Russia and held warm talks with Putin. And among the new BRICS members were high-level guests from Iran, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Kazan in person to promote his country's application for membership. But the big moment, besides Xi and Modi, was the visit of UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres, who spoke with Putin and was filmed greeting him warmly.
• But Putin's more concrete goals have not been achieved. The BRICS group is clearly becoming less and less functional, with old rivalries (e.g. India-China) limiting prospects for cooperation as well as conflicts between new members and potential partners (e.g. Iran-Turkey). Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, was even forced to deny reports of an internal split following a Bloomberg article on India's concerns over China's leadership of the group and Russia.
• The summit's final joint declaration underscores the dysfunction: an amorphous and verbose 134-paragraph document that reached no useful conclusions. Sanctions were only mentioned in three paragraphs, Ukraine only once. The group's lack of focus largely worked in Russia's favor here. For example, countries noted with satisfaction the proposals for mediation and good offices aimed at ensuring a peaceful resolution of the conflict through dialogue and diplomacy.
• Russia's main practical goal, establishing a unified BRICS payments system, is also clearly stalled, as The Bell predicted. Peskov had to explain that the BRICS investment platform, touted by Putin, is not an alternative to SWIFT. And Putin himself said that the group was not creating an alternative to SWIFT and said that countries had their own systems that any of them could join if they wanted. The ultra-ambitious hopes for a single currency for the union went as far as a BRICS souvenir note with which the Russian president was seen.
• There was nothing more concrete to help Moscow overcome Western sanctions. Erdogan told Putin that efforts to eliminate problems in banking operations between our countries continue. But the reality is very different. Payments through Turkey are handled by a single state bank and the supply of dual-use US goods to Russia has been quietly halted following warnings from Washington. In Kazan, Erdogan was further distracted by a deadly terrorist attack and hostage-taking at a military factory in Ankara and will leave the summit earlier than expected. Turkish authorities have provisionally identified activists from the Kurdistan Workers' Party, designated a terrorist organization inside the country, giving them a pretext to intensify repression against Kurds.
• Xi Jinping did not make any big statements in Kazan, but he and Putin discussed mutual agreements between their countries. Of course, there are no concrete details about these agreements, but the tightening of bilateral trade is also evident. Several observers noted that the small summit participants came to Russia not for Putin but for Xi. The notion of China as the unconditional leader of BRICS was emphasized by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko after the summit. If we take BRICS and China as a whole, it is difficult for me to imagine BRICS without China. China is a power. We can directly say that it is the first country in the world. Well, OK, second after the United States. But I think it's the first.

Why the world should care

Russian officials never tire of pointing out that BRICS members represent half of the world's population and a quarter of global GDP. However, the organization is still far from providing Russia with anything more meaningful than second-page stories about how many foreign leaders have visited Kazan.