Russia brings leaders of BRICS and SCO together

Ufa is holding the SCO and BRICS summits on July 8-10. Yesterday President Vladimir Putin held bilateral meetings with the Chinese President, the Prime Minister of India, the heads of South Africa, Belarus and Tajikistan.

Vladimir Putin will continue bilateral talks with the leaders of member states and observer countries of the SCO and the BRICS on the sidelines of the summit. There will be meetings with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and the leaders of China and Mongolia. The heads of state will outline the prospects for further development, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said.  The Russian president will also discuss trade-economic and military-technical cooperation, the talks on the Iran's nuclear program and other issues with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

The BRICS Summit kicked off with a briefing of the Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who said that "the BRICS is in fact an already established new center of the multipolar world and the new and more democratic system of international relations". "The BRICS is a phenomenon of the 21st century and here is its difference from military and political unions that come from another epoch and alliances of states built under a hierarchism principle," TASS cited him as saying.

According to the diplomat, the BRICS is moving forward, and during Russia’s presidency of the group a significant package of documents and agreements has been created that will be unveiled today. "I can say that the BRICS made a huge step forward not only in its own development but also in terms of self-organization," Ryabkov said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in his turn, said that the BRICS is not intended to conflict with other international organizations, adding that it is natural for the BRICS countries to develop bilateral relations with other countries, as is happening between Brazil and the United States now.

The Director of the Center for Situational Monitoring and Regional Research of the RANEPA, Alexander Savchenko, told Vestnik Kavkaza that each time the organization is headed by Russia, the BRICS makes a qualitative leap in its development.

"This time, Russia's chairmanship contributed to the fact that we have taken enough tangible steps in the saturation of the economic, informational and cultural agenda. Russia's presidency always gives a new impetus to the BRICS," Alexander Savchenko said.

The editor-in-chief of the Mir Yevrazii magazine, Eduard Poletayev, noted that the choice of venue for both summits has a symbolic meaning. "There are pairing processes, and the summit in Ufa is a symbol of Russia's approach to the creation of a multipolar world, the effective operation of new integration associations and the saturation of these associations with real deeds that was shown, for example, by the practice of the organization of the reserve fund of the BRICS at $100 billion," he said.

Russia's presidency of the SCO changed things. "The results of this summit are the adoption of the Development Strategy until 2025 and the accession of new members, India and Pakistan, which are quite controversial because of their conflict potential. Russia has demonstrated that its platform is quite capable of combining countries which don't always get along with each other in economic and political areas. In this sense, the impact of its presidency is quite effective," Eduard Poletayev noted.

According to him, Russia's decision to combine two such significant events was quite innovative. "There are no leaders of the European Union and the United States, which usually provide the political mainstream in the world's media, but at the moment Russia has shown that it is quite capable of proving itself in the field of information and make its name as a country which is able to influence the political life of the week," the analyst concluded.