Putin plays host to 36 world leaders at Brics summit in Russia

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ostracised by the west and labelled a possible war criminal by the international criminal court, has played host to 36 world leaders from nations including China, India and Iran as part of a summit of the Brics group designed to display Moscow as anything but isolated.

One of the main aims of the summit will be to speed up ways to reduce the number of dollar transactions, and so mitigate the US ability to use the threat of sanctions to seek to impose its political will.

It was unclear if the UN secretary general is willing to defy the west and Ukraine by attending the summit, as Moscow claims he intends. António Guterres’s spokesperson was equivocal about his plans on Monday.

The ICC has issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest over the abduction of Ukrainian children to Russia.

Moscow said the representatives from 36 countries were attending parts of the three-day meeting, making it the largest international gathering hosted by Putin since he ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia is this year’s chair of the group.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, greeted Putin in Kazan as his dear friend, praising the friendship between the two countries. He said: “The world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century, and the international situation is chaotic and intertwined”. Putin said he wanted to strengthen ties with China to bring greater global stability.

The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, said he wanted the Ukraine conflict resolved quickly and peacefully. Modi visited Kyiv in August and Moscow in July in an effort to encourage talks, casting Dehi as a potential peacemaker, but there have been few developments since.

Cyril Ramaphosa, the South African president, who has also sought to play the role of mediator in the conflict, praised Moscow as a “valued ally” and friend “who supported us from the very beginning in the fight against apartheid”.

Putin, speaking on Tuesday with the president of the Brics New Development Bank, Dilma Rousseff, said the use of local currencies instead of the dollar or euro “helps to keep economic development free from politics as far as possible in the context of today’s world”.

Russia claims the group now represents the global majority that can make up a substantial element of a coming new global order.

The Brics group has already expanded from its five members – South Africa, Russia, China, Brazil and India – to a broader group including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates. Ethiopia and Iran. Argentina applied and then withdrew after its presidential elections.

New applicants, often known as hedging states, that are in various stages of seeking membership include Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Others due to attend the event, apart from the wavering Guterres, include the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, as well as leaders from Algeria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Indonesia and Mexico.

Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, said on the way to the summit in Kazan “Brics can be a way out of American totalitarianism and create a path of multilateralism. Brics can be a solution to deal with the dominance of the dollar and deal with the economic sanctions of countries.”

But with expansion of Brics membership comes the risk of a loss of clear ideological cohesion.

India and Brazil share some of the desire to be freed of the dollar’s dominance, but not to the same extent as China or Russia. Despite the anti-western language in summit communiques, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for instance, has insisted that Brics is “not against anyone”. Brazil is advising against Venezuela being admitted to the group as part of an effort to prevent the alliance becoming purely anti-western.

Alex Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre in Berlin, said overall the Brics summit was already a gift to Putin.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, he said the message of the gathering will be: “Not only is [Russia] far from being an international pariah but also is now a pivotal member of a dynamic group that will shape the future of the international order. That message is not mere rhetorical posturing, nor is it simply a testament to the Kremlin’s skilful diplomacy with non-western countries or to those countries’ self-interested, pragmatic engagement with Russia.”

Putin was unable to risk attending the last Brics summit in Johannesburg because he did not want to embarrass his hosts, who would have been obliged to arrest him on the ICC warrant since South Africa is a signatory to the Rome Statute.

The Russian president may be hoping more generally that world events are swinging in his direction, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House next month and the possibility of favourable result in the elections in Georgia this weekend.

The future of the Ukraine conflict in the short term rests on Trump’s election, but even if he loses, a war fatigue in Europe is leading all sides to conclude that Ukraine will at least have to open talks with Putin while Russian troops still occupy a large part of eastern Ukraine. A decision by Guterres to attend the summit would have international consequences.

In 2014, Brazil, China, India and South Africa abstained from voting on a UN general assembly resolution in support of Ukraine’s territorial integrity following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Their unity was diluted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, where India, China and South Africa abstained, and Brazil condemned Russia’s actions.

But the Brics+ founding purpose is not security but a means to develop economic and tech platforms that are immune to US pressure and sanctions, in part by circumventing the dollar and pushing the internationalisation of the yuan.

Despite Brics+ group having a larger combined GDP than either the G7 or the EU, its capital share and subsequent voting influence within institutions such as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) remains significantly smaller, because each member country’s voting power is weighted on the basis of its financial contribution to the World Bank.