By Vladimir Soldatkin and Guy Faulconbridge
KAZAN, Russia (Reuters) – China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi and some other BRICS leaders discussed the war in Ukraine with President Vladimir Putin as the Kremlin chief chaired a major summit aimed at showing Western attempts to isolate Russia have failed.
BRICS – an idea thought up inside Goldman Sachs two decades ago to describe the growing economic clout of China and other major emerging markets – is now a group that accounts for 45% of the world’s population and 35% of the global economy.
But there are divisions and concerns even among members about how such a vast grouping can expand so swiftly while preserving some sense of geopolitical purpose and achieve any real economic results.
Putin, whose administration has dismissed war crimes allegations against him as political, opened the summit on Wednesday by saying that more than 30 states had expressed interest in joining the group but that it was important to strike a balance in any expansion.
“It would be wrong to ignore the unprecedented interest of the countries of the Global South and East in strengthening contacts with BRICS,” Putin told BRICS leaders in Kazan, a Russian city on the banks of the Volga, Europe’s longest river.
“At the same time, it is necessary to maintain a balance and prevent a decrease in the effectiveness of the BRICS,” he said, adding that the grouping would also discuss “acute regional conflicts” – shorthand for the Middle East and Ukraine.
The BRICS summit takes place as global finance chiefs gather in Washington against the backdrop of the two conflicts, a flagging Chinese economy and worries that the U.S. presidential election could ignite new trade battles.
China and India buy about 90% of Russia’s oil – Moscow’s biggest foreign currency earner. Russia is the world’s second largest oil exporter.
BRICS
The acronym BRIC was coined in 2001 by then-Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill in a research paper that underlined the massive growth potential of Brazil, Russia, India and China this century.
Russia, India and China began to meet more formally, eventually adding Brazil, then South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia has yet to formally join.
More than 20 leaders, including Chinese President Xi, Indian Prime Minister Modi, United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian are attending the BRICS summit.
Putin’s foreign policy aide said that further expansion of the group would have to take into account certain criteria and that a list of 13 countries for possible expansion had been agreed on.
“We will need to talk to them about their degree of readiness to join either full-fledged membership in BRICS, or in some appropriate form,” Yuri Ushakov was quoted as saying by TASS.
The war in Ukraine, though, hangs over the Kazan summit.
WAR
Modi told Putin in public that he wanted peace in Ukraine. Xi discussed the war in the Ukraine behind closed doors with the Kremlin chief.
Russia, which is advancing, controls about one fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea which it seized and unilaterally annexed in 2014, about 80% of the Donbas – a coal-and-steel zone comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – and over 70% of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
Putin has said that Moscow would not trade away the four regions of eastern Ukraine that it says are now part of Russia and that Moscow wants its long-term security interests taken into account in Europe.
The final BRICS communique is likely to include reference to proposals from China and Brazil on ending the war.
China and Brazil have been trying at the United Nations to garner support from developing countries for a truce. Ukraine has said Beijing and Brasília are doing the bidding of Moscow.
Putin has said the Chinese-Brazilian proposals could be a basis for ending the war. He sent thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine and Russia have each made separate proposals for ending the war which are far apart.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin in Kazan and Guy Faulconbridge and Dmitry Antonov in Moscow; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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