The BRICS countries refused to fight together with Putin against the West and the dollar

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s idea of ​​turning BRICS into an anti-Western coalition that would shake the “world order” and the hegemony of the dollar did not meet with enthusiasm among the main member countries of the block.

India does not want to allow BRICS to become an ‘anti-US’ group dominated by Russia and China, it said before Bloomberg Indian officials familiar with the matter.

That is why, according to the group’s interlocutors, New Delhi is against the further expansion of BRICS, which joined last year with 6 new countries and dozens of others who requested it, including refugees such as Myanmar or Afghanistan.

India’s position is shared by Brazil and South Africa, officials from those countries told Bloomberg.

The United Arab Emirates, which joined BRICS after the 2023 summit, “absolutely rejects” attempts to portray membership in the bloc as a sign that the Global South is against the West, a source told Bloomberg. The UAE has very good relations with Western countries, including the US, another representative of the country emphasized.

At the BRICS summit in Kazan, which began on Tuesday and which the Kremlin called “the most important foreign policy event” ever held in Russia, Putin plans to offer his peers an alternative to the Western regime for international payments. According to the opinion of the Kremlin, banks and central banks of member countries of the group should connect to make transactions, bypassing the dollar, which Putin says is “declining” and loss of credit due to US sanctions policy.

However, the bloc’s countries ignored a meeting of BRICS finance ministers and central bankers held in Moscow on the eve of the summit: China, India and South Africa sent representatives and senior officials of the place of ministers.

Even China, which became Russia’s largest trading partner after the invasion of Ukraine, believes that Putin’s idea of ​​payments passing the dollar is too ambitious, says Wang Yiwei, director of the Center for European Studies at the People’s University of China in Beijing: unlike Russia, the other BRICS countries are not under Western sanctions and have no direct incentive to change the global financial order.

Already in 2022, Putin proposed that BRICS will create their own reserve currency to end the “verification” of the dollar, which still accounts for more than half of the world’s payments. He accused Western authorities of “irresponsible” macroeconomic policies, including “running the printing press, uncontrolled emissions and the accumulation of unsecured debts.” But he did not believe his BRICS colleagues.

The project is “not mature”, the countries are not “ready for it”Putin admitted at a meeting with journalists from the bloc countries on the eve of the current summit in Kazan.