Vladimir Putin heralded the onset of a new “world order” at the BRICS summit, as he steps up his confrontation with the West.
The Russian President is hosting a three-day summit with leaders from 36 countries in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan.
Russia has long resented what it perceives as US and Western hegemony in global affairs.
One of Putin’s key foreign policy goals has been to undermine Western political, military and economic influence by creating what he calls a “multipolar world”.
At the BRICS summit on Wednesday, Putin restated his determination to hobble the West.
“The process of forming a multipolar world order is underway, a dynamic and irreversible process,” Putin said.
Russia has tried to portray its war in Ukraine as part of the process of reshaping international relations and “global dynamics”.
It sees the war as a broader ideological and existential conflict with the West.
Aleksander Dugin, an ultranationalist Russian philosopher, has characterised Putin’s invasion as a holy war against “absolute Evil, embodied in Western civilisation and its liberal-totalitarian hegemony”.
BRICS is an informal grouping of emerging economies hoping to increase their sway in the global order.
Established in 2009, it was founded on the premise that international institutions were overly dominated by Western powers and had ceased to serve developing countries.
The bloc has sought to coordinate its members’ economic and diplomatic policies, establish new financial institutions, and reduce dependence on the US dollar.
Its founding members were Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – hence its acronym.
Currently consisting of 10 countries, BRICS hopes to welcome another 12 members soon.
Ukraine claims that Moscow failed to win support for its invasion of Ukraine at the summit, after Putin faced direct calls to end the conflict from some of his closest and most important partners.
“The BRICS summit, which Russia planned to use to split the world, has once again demonstrated that the world majority remains on the side of Ukraine in its quest to guarantee a comprehensive, just and sustainable peace,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry claimed.