Putin’s expanded BRICS summit proves he has friends — but risks buckling under its own contradictions

Russian President Vladimir Putin during the BRICS Business Forum in Moscow on Friday.

Russia is flexing its muscles at the center of the BRICS economic bloc, which seeks to rival the West.

The nation is hosting a meeting of the group this week, the first since the group almost doubled its membership.

The larger grouping gives members more weight — and is a rebuke to Western-led attempts to isolate Russia economically.

But it also complicates things, introducing new competing interests and rivalries.

Geopolitical analysts say it could dilute the group’s ability to take action and reduce it to a talking shop.

Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates are the new BRICS entrants, joining the earlier members Russia, India, China, Brazil, and South Africa. Saudi Arabia has been invited to join but has not formally done so yet.

Russian President Vladimir Putin touted the expansion as proof of the group’s “growing authority” and role in international affairs.

Yet geopolitical tensions and competing interests within the group are dragging down Russia’s efforts to use it to chip away at the dominance of the West, particularly the US dollar.

“BRICS expansion is no easy task,” said Abishur Prakash, the founder of The Geopolitical Business, a strategy advisory firm in Toronto. “It risks creating rival camps within the group.”

A ‘raw’ grouping

Since the bloc’s founding in 2006 — with Brazil, Russia, India, and China as members before South Africa joined in 2010 — it has tried to challenge Western economic dominance.

Over the past two decades, its members experienced significant economic growth. After the recent expansion, its member states represent almost 46% of the world’s population and about 25% of global exports.

Last year, more than 40 countries expressed interest in joining the bloc.

But Anton Barbashin, the cofounder and editorial director at Riddle Russia, an online journal on Russian affairs, described the group as a “raw collection” of countries.

He said it had “no chance” of political unity given its members’ competing interests and starkly differing attitudes.

Members have grappled with internal disagreements over relations with the West, territorial claims, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Others are engaged in internal standoffs. India and China have clashed over disputed territory along their border, though they announced a deal on patrolling arrangements this week.

Some countries — notably India and South Africa — also have a tricky balancing act to do, engaging with the group without alienating their partners in the West.

Talking shop

Barbashin told B-17 that the BRICS summit was important for Russia because it had been cut out from other international platforms.

It’s a way to communicate and possibly strike “some deals in the future that we don’t necessarily foresee,” he said.

In total, representatives of 32 countries are set to attend the summit this week, according to Moscow.

But Barbashin said the group’s size masked its relative impotence.

“It’s just a nice facade,” he said, “and it falls within the idea that economic growth should translate into a greater political setting.”

Leaders are expected to discuss how far members are willing to commit to the group.

Una Aleksandra Berzina-Cerenkova, the director at Riga Stradins University’s China Studies Center, told Politico that “China uses BRICS to give it a mandate to push global visions and post-Western vision.”

During a press briefing held by the Center for European Policy Analysis on Monday, one analyst foresaw major hurdles for the group to move past its status as a “debating club.”

Evgeny Roshchin, a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, said the group would need to choose how to distribute power among its members should more join.

“Behind the rhetoric, there’s a huge concern — even within Russia — whether the new members will become their equals,” he said, noting that Russia could lose its leverage and decision-making among a large group of notionally equal members.

Taking on the dollar

Another challenge BRICS members like Russia and China face is trying to change the fundamentals of global financial-trading systems that rely overwhelmingly on the US dollar.

During a BRICS Business Forum in Moscow last week, Putin said group members were working on alternative payment systems as a rival to SWIFT.

The alternative systems would aid cross-border payments between members, according to a report by Russia’s finance ministry, its central bank, and the consultancy Yakov & Partners.

It envisioned a network of payments using local currencies rather than a default reserve currency like the dollar.

Russia already has a model it can look to for transactions among central banks: the mBridge system under the Bank for International Settlements.

BRICS members are also toying with alternative currencies, spanning China’s digital yuan and Moscow’s interest in crypto.

The greenback, though, will be hard to dethrone — even without competing priorities and rivalry among BRICS members.

“Russia wants to create an alternative to Western financial infrastructures,” Barbashin said.

But “there’s no chance of making anything like a union or an alliance,” he said.

He said that while BRICS members were united in a desire for change, “there’s no real strategy within BRICS aside from fancy phrases to make it work.”