Putin brings together economies he hopes will eclipse the West

The Russian leader hopes to use the meeting of the BRICS group, which includes China and India, as a counterweight to the West

By Valerie Hopkins and David Pierson

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the West imposed sweeping economic sanctions, cut its access to the global banking system, and sought to isolate Russia diplomatically from the rest of the world. But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is determined to show the West that he has important allies on his side.

This week Russia is hosting the so-called BRICS group — which stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — in a gathering of emerging market countries. The meeting, which begins today, has expanded this year to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Its name notwithstanding (it was coined by a Wall Street banker in 2001), BRICS now includes countries representing almost half the world’s population and more than 35% of global economic output, adjusted by purchasing power. The conference is intended to present a hefty showcase of economic might but also entice new countries into a coalition Russia hopes to build that would form a new world order not dominated by the West.

“This summit is about Putin punching back,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin. Putin presents his country’s war in Ukraine as “the spearhead of destroying the old world order and helping to build a new one,” Gabuev said. “And BRICS is the most potent and representative structure of this new world order,” he added.

That was a message Putin emphasised at a meeting of officials and businessmen last week in Moscow ahead of the summit.

“In the last decade, over 40% of the growth in global gross domestic product of the entire world economic dynamics came from the BRICS countries,” Putin said, asserting that the developed Group of Seven countries is playing a declining role in the global economy. “The gap is widening, and it will further widen — this is inevitable,” he said.

Putin was unable to travel to last year’s summit in South Africa because of a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court, to which South Africa is a signatory. While other leaders held high-level bilateral meetings, Putin was forced to deliver his speech, and hold all his meetings, virtually. This year, Putin said he would have 17 bilateral meetings in addition to those in the larger group format.

“Standing next to all of these leaders shaking hands and taking pictures, Vladimir Putin will be trying to tell the world that Russia is not isolated,” Gabuev said.

The Russian leader will be projecting that “Russia is part of the global majority and the part of the international community that is trying to isolate Russia is the West,” Gabuev said. “So the West is, by default, the global minority that’s ostracising Russia.”

Beijing and Moscow are keen to see BRICS expand further, and the Kremlin invited representatives from another 20 countries who have expressed interest in membership to participate in this year’s summit.

Both capitals have pushed proposals to dramatically change the global financial system. At the previous summit, there was discussion of creating a BRICS currency, which did not materialise. This year the dominant proposal is for a BRICS payment system, known as BRICS Bridge, that would help Russia circumvent the issues it has had sending and receiving money in global commerce because of sanctions.

Russia’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, has also tried to muster support for an organisation that could serve as a replacement for the International Monetary Fund, which froze contact with Moscow in 2022.

While Putin will get to play the role of host, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, will arrive at the summit in a commanding position. Xi is expected to hold a bilateral meeting with Putin, which would mark the fourth face-to-face meeting between the two leaders since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Despite growing pressure from the West on China not to aid Russia’s war effort, Xi and Putin have deepened their relationship, in no small part because of their shared grievances toward the United States.

The host nation of the BRICS gathering has grown ever more reliant on Beijing to sustain its war, and China represents more than 60% of the grouping’s economic output. (It was roughly 70% before the addition of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE.) China’s economic heft within the group allows Beijing to pledge more investments and loans to other members.

“Countries are looking for economic benefits from this association,” said Henry Huiyao Wang, president of the Centre for China and Globalisation in Beijing. “That’s what makes BRICS so attractive. And China being the largest economy in BRICS makes it a magnet.”

Analysts said they would be watching how Xi interacts with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and whether the two leaders build on recent diplomatic momentum aimed at easing border tensions. Courting Modi would allow Xi to drive something of a wedge between the West and India, which has drawn closer to the US in recent years as a member of a security grouping called the Quad.

“It would be huge if Xi and Modi shake hands, smile and telegraph a message that tensions between the two Asian powers are easing, even just a bit,” said Eric Olander, the editor of the website China Global South Project.

Among China’s priorities for BRICS is continued expansion of the group as a way to diminish the power of its chief geopolitical rival, the US.

As Beijing’s relations with the West have frayed over a host of issues — none more damaging than its tacit support for Russia’s war in Ukraine — as China has shifted more attention to courting developing and non-aligned countries. As more countries join BRICS, Beijing can argue, as Moscow does, that it has more legitimacy as a global power than Washington and its club of rich nations, analysts said.

“China is keen to cast this as a coalition of the Global South against the US-led West,” Yun Sun, the director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre in Washington, said of BRICS. “The caveat is that the bigger the coalition, the less effective its policy coordination and unity.”

The inability of BRICS foreign ministers to release a joint statement last month at a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations has come to underscore the difficulties the group faces as it grows.

Even before expansion, finding agreement was a challenge, largely because of the simmering rivalry between China and India for leadership of the Global South.

While China can rely on support from isolated, anti-Western member states like Russia and Iran, it will have difficulty persuading India, Brazil and South Africa, the group’s major democracies, to take a more adversarial stance toward the US. To those countries, BRICS is a way to strike a balance between Beijing and Washington, not an opportunity to pick sides, experts said.

That has also kept BRICS-curious countries like Saudi Arabia out of the group, at least for the time being. Last year, Saudi Arabia was invited to join the BRICS, but has refrained from doing so, even leaving the question of their participation in the summit open. Last week, Russia’s finance ministry had to roll back comments describing Saudi Arabia as a member of BRICS.

Putin visited Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh last December, when he said that Russian-Saudi relations had reached an “unprecedented level.” But the oil-rich country is trying to balance its relations with Russia with the need to maintain good ties with the US and other Western countries.

The BRICS group has been boosted by the return of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to power in Brazil, which will take over the rotating BRICs presidency from Russia in January 2025. During his first two terms in office, between 2003 and 2011, Lula helped found the bloc and loudly advocated for more cooperation among developing nations.