Russian President Vladimir Putin enters a hall for meeting with Mauritania's president on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia on Oct. 24.MAXIM SHIPENKOV/AFP/Getty Images
Surrounded by the leaders of the expanding group of countries known as BRICS, Vladimir Putin didn’t just look comfortable in declaring “a new world order,” he looked smug.
The West – what Mr. Putin would call the old world order – considers the Russian President a tyrant and a war criminal. That didn’t matter this week in the central Russian city of Kazan, where Mr. Putin hosted the 16th summit of BRICS, which originally comprised Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa but expanded this year to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. The gathering was also attended by 26 other countries that were either observing or seeking membership, plus United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
It has been a good week for Mr. Putin. In addition to hosting the BRICS summit, there were widespread reports that North Korea had sent thousands of troops to Russia for training ahead of an expected deployment to the front lines of the war in Ukraine.
When Mr. Putin launched the full-scale invasion 2½ years ago, the United States and its allies imposed punishing sanctions and other measures on Russia. If the West’s strategies were working, Mr. Putin would be isolated and presiding over a crumbling economy; instead, he is gaining new allies as Russia’s economy looks set to grow by 3.6 per cent this year.
Meanwhile, the war grinds on, with Russian troops slowly pushing Ukrainian forces backward along a 1,000-kilometre front line, laying waste to entire cities in the process.
In Mr. Putin’s vision – which received full-throated backing from Iran, but less bombastic support from the other core leaders – BRICS is about “the global majority” breaking free from the rules-based international order that the West established and has presided over since the end of the Cold War.
“All our countries share similar aspirations, values and a vision of a new democratic world order,” he said Thursday in his closing remarks to the summit. In a speech short on specifics, he said a new international system should be based on “the legitimate interests and sovereign choice of nations,” rather than the current framework, which saw tools such as sanctions used to “ostensibly promote democracy, human rights and the climate change agenda.”
In Mr. Putin’s new order, great powers such as Russia would be able to use force against their neighbours without consequences. Nor would the decisions of leaders like him be subject to the judgment of institutions such as the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the alleged mass deportation of Ukrainian children.
The summit’s final declaration criticized “the disruptive effect of unlawful unilateral coercive measures, including illegal sanctions, on the world economy.” Russia’s economic survival is owing in large part to the willingness of China and India to continue buying Russian oil despite Western sanctions targeting Russia’s energy industry. Indian imports of Russian crude have jumped ninefold since the start of the war in Ukraine, while Chinese imports are up by a third. (China is also the main market of Iranian oil sold via a series of black-market schemes in order to avoid U.S.-led sanctions.)
“After the BRICS summit, even the Americans and the Baltic States will probably stop talking about Russia’s isolation in the world,” political analyst and occasional Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov wrote on his Telegram channel Thursday. “The large-scale and successful BRICS summit is a major diplomatic victory for Vladimir Putin.”
Mr. Putin gave his speech flanked by the leaders of the world’s two most populous countries, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mr. Xi stands accused of running a network of detention camps in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region and of militarily threatening Taiwan, which Beijing claims as Chinese territory, while Mr. Modi’s India has allegedly ordered political assassinations in Canada and the U.S. But those issues weren’t discussed in Kazan.
Instead, the BRICS summit was the forum for the first face-to-face talks between Mr. Xi and Mr. Modi in five years – two days after China and India reached a deal to jointly patrol their shared border in the Himalayas, bringing an apparent end to a dispute that sparked deadly fighting at the frontier in 2020.
Both Mr. Xi and Mr. Modi issued statements afterward emphasizing the need for a “multipolar world” – language that refers to breaking away from the current international system dominated by the United States. The BRICS leaders also discussed ways to reduce their collective reliance on the U.S. dollar.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi, in their own face-to-face meeting, would likely have discussed the reported movement of North Korean troops into Russia for training. Ukraine, South Korea and the U.S. have all warned that they expect the soldiers will soon be sent to join Mr. Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Such a deployment would almost certainly require the approval of China, Pyongyang’s closest ally, though Lin Jian, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, said Thursday that Beijing was “not aware of this situation.” Speaking in Kazan, Mr. Xi called for diplomatic solutions to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
While BRICS remains mostly a talking shop without a unified economic strategy or firm military links, the collective clout of its members was demonstrated by Mr. Guterres’s decision to travel to Kazan despite loud complaints from Ukraine, which argued the Secretary-General should not attend a meeting hosted by an accused war criminal.
Mr. Guterres, however, pointed out that BRICS now represents nearly half the world’s population. He said he had a responsibility to try to find a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine, as well as to the expanding conflict pitting Israel against Iran and its proxies across the Middle East, including Hamas and Hezbollah. In addition to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were also in Kazan on Thursday.
Mr. Guterres told the summit that it would take the entire international community “working as one global family” to address the spreading wars. He called for immediate ceasefires in Gaza, Lebanon and Sudan and “a just peace” in Ukraine.
The call for global unity didn’t seem to move his Russian host. “In families, unfortunately, there are often quarrels, scandals and division of property,” Mr. Putin said with a hint of a smile after Mr. Guterres finished speaking. “Sometimes it even comes to fights.”