‘BRICS shield against isolation of Russia’

March 5, 2015, 9:18 am

BRICS Summit participants in Brazil: Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff, President of China Xi Jinping and President of South Africa Jacob Zuma on 15 July 2014 [PPIO]

Signaling that Russian foreign policy is not to be dictated by the US and its allies, Russia has said its membership in BRICS prevents it from being isolated internationally. Sergey Naryshkin, speaker and leader of the Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament said on Wednesday that the BRICS group of nations account for 42 per cent of the global population and 27 per cent of the global economy.
“They seem to have problems with geography, and they think the world is the US and a group of satellite states, although it is far from it,” he told a local broadcaster, Rossiya24.
“It is simply impossible to isolate the Russian economy, as producers of this crisis of mistrust are saying now and then, bravely stating that they have ‘isolated Russia’,” he added.
Russia is slated to host the 7^th BRICS Summit later this summer.
The first board meeting of the $100 billion BRICS Development Bank is supposed to take place in April in the Russian city of Ufa.
The BRICS combined GDP grew 300 per cent in the last decade as opposed to 60 per cent growth registered by the developed world.
BRICS launched a $100 billion development bank and a currency reserve pool in July this year in their first concrete step toward reshaping the Western-dominated international financial system.
In the middle of negotiations with EU leaders like French President Francoise Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to show that he still has major allies in the fastest growing economies in the world.
In a clear indication of its strong support for its BRICS partner, China has said western nations must shed their zero-sum mentality and accommodate Russian security concerns over the Ukraine crisis.
The Ukraine crisis is being fueled by games played by the US and the European Union, said a Chinese diplomat last week.
“The West should abandon the zero-sum mentality, and take the real security concerns of Russia into consideration,” said Chinese envoy to Belgium Qu Xing.