Putin puts on a BRICS spectacle

Last week’s BRICS summit in Kazan was probably the most successful international event staged by Vladimir Putin since the start of the war. It was the largest diplomatic forum, with the most world leaders, since at least 2022. Despite the show that Putin managed to put on and the 20 or so foreign leaders that he managed to draw, there were no concrete steps towards Russia’s greatest goal — the establishment of an international payment system independent of Western banks.

• Putin achieved his main political aim through the BRICS summit, showing that Russia is not completely isolated, while also annoying the West, as Western media reported (1, 2). The summit was the most genuinely representative forum hosted 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 BRICS’ newer members there were top-level guests from Iran, Egypt, the UAE and Ethiopia. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew to Kazan in person, promoting his country’s application for membership. But the big highlight other than the likes of 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 were not met. The BRICS group is clearly growing less functional, with old rivalries (e.g. India-China) limiting the prospects for cooperation as well as conflicts between potential new members and 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 about India’s concerns over China and Russia’s leadership of the group.
• The summit’s final joint declaration points to the dysfunction: an amorphous, wordy document of 134 paragraphs that failed to reach any useful conclusions. Sanctions were mentioned in just three paragraphs, Ukraine once. The group’s lack of focus largely worked for Russia here. For instance, the countries “noted with satisfaction” proposals for “mediation and good offices designed to ensure a peaceful settlement of the conflict through dialog and diplomacy.”
• Russia’s main practical aim — the establishment of a unified BRICS payment system — has 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 the group was not creating a SWIFT alternative and said countries had their own systems that each of them could join if they wanted. Ultra-ambitious hopes for a single currency for the union got as far as a souvenir “BRICS banknote” which the Russian president was spotted with.
• There was nothing more concrete on helping Moscow overcome Western sanctions. Erdogan told Putin that “efforts to eliminate problems in banking operations between our countries” are continuing. But the reality is very different. Payments via Turkey are handled by one state bank and the supply of American dual-use goods to Russia has quietly stopped following warnings from Washington. In Kazan, Erdogan was further distracted by a deadly terrorist attack and hostage taking at a military plant in Ankara and will leave the summit early. Turkish authorities have provisionally identified militants from the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is designated a terrorist organization inside the county, giving them a pretext to ramp up repression against the Kurds.
• Xi Jinping did not make any big statements in Kazan, but he and Putin discussed mutual deals between their countries. Naturally, there are no concrete details of those deals, but the tightening of bilateral trade is also evident. Several observers noted that the “smaller” participants of the summit came to Russia not for Putin but for Xi. The notion of China as the unconditional leader of BRICS was highlighted by Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko after the summit. “If we take BRICS and China as a whole, it’s hard for me to imagine BRICS without China. China is a power. We can state directly that it's 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 how BRICS members represent half the world’s population and a quarter of global GDP. However, the organization is still a long way from providing Russia anything more meaningful than second-page media stories of how many foreign leaders visited Kazan.