Russian President Vladimir Putin Wednesday said that over 30 countries have expressed a desire to join the BRICS alliance, an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which had added four new members - Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates - in January this year.
It would be wrong to disregard unprecedented interest from the Global South and East in building contacts with BRICS. More than 30 states have already declared the desire to do that in one or another form. Meanwhile, he said, at the same time, it is necessary to maintain a balance and not let the decline in effectiveness of BRICS. Speaking at the opening of the 16th BRICS Summit in the Russian city of Kazan, Putin stated his first remark:.
Apart from Putin, the day's first engagement was a summit meeting in the restricted format that had present the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chinese President Xi Jinping, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Luis Ecker Vieira.
There were present at the meeting several key officials from BRICS, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.
Before the meeting began, a joint photo session of the heads of delegations of BRICS took place.
In his opening remarks, the Russian President emphasized that it was for the first time that the BRICS Summit is also being held in an expanded format as the mottos of the Russian presidency were strengthening multilateralism for equitable global development and security.
"We pursued strengthening the authority of BRICS, enhancing its role in the settlement of urgent, global, and regional problems, and contributed to it in any other way to deepen multifaceted cooperation between our states in three major areas: politics and security, economics and finance, and cultural and humanitarian contacts. And, of course, we did everything so that new member countries could enter the work of the association smoothly and most intensely," he said.
The leaders agreed to conduct debates on more important issues of the world agenda during the narrow format, which implies cooperation among the BRICS states within the international arena, acute settlement of regional conflicts, etc.
As for the implementation of two important decisions of the previous summit, which was held in Johannesburg, the Russian President said that the leaders will discuss the further deepening of financial cooperation within BRICS and further expansion of the organization.
We are all witnesses to the dynamic development of BRICS, strengthening of its authority and influence in world affairs. Truly enormous political, economic, scientific, technological and human potential is possessed by member states of our association. At the same time we unite by common values and worldview," he said.
Putin stated that it would be just to say that BRICS includes like-minded people; sovereign countries represent different continents, models of development, religions, original civilisations and cultures. All of the member states advocate equality, good neighbourliness and mutual respect.
This, in itself, is the core strategy of the BRICS course on the global stage, meeting the aspirations of the main part of the international community, so-called global majority, and it is precisely this course that is especially in demand at the current conditions when truly fundamental changes take place in the world, and the process of forming a multipolar world is underway, he concluded.
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