What does the BRICS summit indicate about Russia’s place in global order?

The ongoing 3-day BRICS summit chaired by Russia signals that Moscow still has the ability to exert global influence despite the Ukraine war and Western sanctions, according to experts.

As the 2024 chair of BRICS, Russia has welcomed 36 countries in Kazan, the capital of the Turkic-majority semi-autonomous Republic of Tatarstan within the Russian Federation.

“Certainly, it’s true that Russia continues to have global influence to the extent that you have the presence of so many of the countries in Kazan,” says Harsh V Pant, Vice President of Studies and Foreign Policy at the New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation, and a professor of international relations with King's India Institute at King’s College London.

“BRICS has been an important instrument through which Russia wields this influence across a large part of the world,” Pant tells TRT World, adding that the Kazan meeting shows many countries do not see Russia “as the only guilty party” in the Ukraine conflict, allowing Moscow to engage with countries, particularly, in the Global South.

BRICS, a non-Western bloc originally founded by Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, has recently raised its voice against the US-led global order in different conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza, seeking to consolidate its reach across the globe. Türkiye, a NATO ally, Palestinian Authority and countries like Mexico and Indonesia are also participating, showing Moscow’s diplomatic depth across the international community.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, this year’s BRICS meeting is full of opportunities as the summit represents “the like-minded nations of the Global South,” which he said makes “the global majority” with an aim to defend “the principles of a just and democratic world order based on international law, sovereignty, and equality”.

Russia and Global South

The term Global South emerged in the 1970s, referring to the lower income countries with the history of supporting the Cold War-era Non-Aligned Movement, an alliance defending neutrality in the face of the fierce competition between the US-led NATO and Moscow-led communist blocs.

Most recently, the term has made a comeback as many as 125 countries attended the first virtual Voice of the Global South summit in India in January 2023. Russia and China, the two anti-Western states, have recently pursued a common agenda, which Putin says defends the interests of the Global South against the US-led Western global order.

“Despite Western sanctions and Western opposition, Russia has continued to carve out a space for itself in the global order and it will continue to have that space, irrespective of what approach the West takes,” says Indian professor Pant.

Other analysts echoed a similar view.

The Kazan meeting “proves that Russia is not in deficit”, says Kamran Gasanov, a political analyst at the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), a Moscow-based think tank. “The pressure of the West did not succeed,” Gasanov tells TRT World, referring to Western sanctions.

Despite an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Putin, the Russian president receives guests and goes abroad, he says. It is “symbolic” that the first visits after his reelection were made not only by Chinese President Xi Jinping but also by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which “speaks of the highly developed status of the Kremlin,” he adds.

Gregory Simons, a Sweden-based independent analyst and researcher, also finds Western sanctions useless. The Western bloc’s sanction system and their order of “vassal and client states" ensures that both Russia and China “remain influential”, even increasing their sway on the Global South in response to “US-led coercion” in 21st century international relations.

“Instead, it is the US and the Global North that are becoming increasingly isolated and vulnerable in the newly emerging global geopolitical order,” Simons tells TRT World.

During the current summit, BRICS seeks to develop pathways for a new common currency for the group to move away from the restrictions of Western monetary system dominated by the US dollar’s king status.

While all BRICS states want to diminish their dependence on the dollar-based economic system, China was originally against this idea due to its assessment that yuan can play such a common currency role, according to Sergei Markov, a Russian political scientist and former advisor of Putin, who now leads the Institute for Political Studies.

But in Kazan, the leaders seek to create a new system that allows BRICS states to trade in local currencies without the use of US dollar or swift, Markov tells TRT World. Whether it succeeds or not remains to be seen, he adds.

The summit agenda also includes the ceasefire calls for both the Ukraine conflict and Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon.

BRICS – what is the goal?

This year BRICS increased its membership by accepting the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Ethiopia and Egypt to the bloc, while several other countries have shown interest in joining the non-Western club, which has increasingly become popular across the Global South.

BRICS is a loosely organised “very soft” group, which has no charter and secretariat, resembling a political club, says Markov.

The main goal of BRICS is to ensure “sovereignty” which has been threatened by the Western order, says Markov. Different countries around the world aiming to preserve and “consolidate their sovereignty” formed the club and other like-minded countries are interested in joining it, says the Russian analyst.

Although Putin says that BRICS is not an anti-Western coalition – arguing that the main threat to sovereignty comes from the US-led alliance and not the other way around – Markov predicts that the bloc will become anti-Western by default. He notes that one of the group’s key principles is to resist US-led sanctions, which they see as a violation of sovereignty.

For Markov, BRICS is not just a coalition of countries but “a coalition of civilisations”, which includes Chinese, Indian, Russian, Latin American, African, Muslim Arab and Persian civilisations.

Saudi Arabia, a major gulf power, as well as Pakistan and Indonesia, the two Muslim majority countries, might also join the club, meaning Arab and South Asian Muslim traditions will also find their voice in BRICS, says Markov. If Türkiye and Azerbaijan join the club, then, BRICS will also include Turkic-Muslim civilisation, he adds, referring to the socio-cultural depths the alliance can offer.

However, Markov pointed out that BRICS does not represent the cultural spheres of Anglo-Saxon, French and German states “because they don’t like it and they have another choice”.

The future of BRICS

While at least 20 other countries want to join BRICS, if this happens, the three founding states, China, Russia and India, are “afraid” that the group can be paralysed due to rising internal contradictions, Markov says, adding that in light of avoiding new complexities, it’s highly unlikely that new members will be added to the group this year.

Markov believes that BRICS needs “clear rules” to join the club as well as developing a structure where states can be partners not members to the non-Western bloc. These partner states might “have almost all the rights of members except the right to vote”, which is a possible solution to diminish problems inside BRICS, he says.

Gasanov thinks similarly to Markov in terms of its rapid expansion, but he finds the alliance’s future “promising”. The future of BRICS would be determined by “whether a loose coalition of very distinct countries are able to come forward with a coherent agenda,” says Pant, the Indian professor.

“At the moment, it is enough that they bring a distinct voice on the global stage, but to move forward to continue to have that momentum, the agenda will have to be very specific and intra-breaks differences will have to be continuing to be at a minimum,” he says.

One of the challenges within the BRICS is the dominance of China, which is bigger than all other countries in the bloc. “How China plays its cards and how far China is sensitive to the interests of other actors within this coalition” will make a crucial impact on the future of BRICS, he says.

“The future of BRICS is potentially a bright one as an institution to manage and regulate political, cultural and economic relations of the Global South is necessary given the approach that employs and places at its core the spirit of reciprocity and relational interactions based on consensus,” says Simons.

While the US and Global North is in a state of relative decline and losing its capability and capacity to effectively coerce and destroy countries, it is also becoming increasingly irrational and desperate, adds Simons, pointing out the necessity of having groups like BRICS, which can face such threats from the West collectively and more effectively.