On December 19, Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, projected an image of strength to the world. During the traditional news conference Putin’s annual report, NBC journalist Keir Simmons suggested that Russia is weaker now than during Donald Trump’s first term. Putin’s response was forceful: “Russia is stronger than it has been in the last two or three years because we are becoming a truly sovereign country.”
For more than four hours, Putin praised the country’s economic growth and its geopolitics outside the hard core of the West, accepted questions from international journalists and boasted of military achievements and leading the moral war against porn (banned in the country). Throughout the day, the word Putin became a Trending Topic on the social network
The Russian Government’s press conference reflected the vestiges of the XVI BRICS Summit, held in Kazan (Russia) between October 22 and 24, in which Putin received 24 heads of State and Government. The Russian presidency of the BRICS in 2024 not only served for the incorporation de facto of the new members (Egypt, Iran, United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia), but for the projection of an alternative world order in which representatives from 32 countries also attended. Even António Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, accepted the invitation. “Russia is not isolated,” Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov asserted vehemently.
The Kazan summit marked a leap in scale for the BRICS, founded informally in 2006 by Brazil, Russia, India and China to strengthen their economic exchanges (South Africa joined the bloc in 2010, providing the ‘S’ in the acronym). Lula da Silva, president of Brazil and one of the historical promoters of the BRICS, could not go to Kazan after having suffered an accident.
Even so, his intervention had a prominent space and he anticipated that the Brazilian presidency will be at the service of the “fight for a multipolar world and for less asymmetric relations between countries.” Furthermore, Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections places the future leadership of the BRICS in the eye of the storm.
New world order?
At the Kazan summit, Putin offered Brazil to maintain the presidency of the Development Bank (or the BRICS bank), based in Shanghai. Although Russia was the member state that should assume the presidency of the bank, it stated that it did not want to transfer its international problems to the organization. For this reason, Dilma Rousseff, former president of Brazil and current president of the bank, will remain at the helm of the Development Bank for five more years.
At the close of the Kazan summit, Brazil – one of the countries that has the best diplomatic relationship with the West – announced the creation of an alternative bank payment system to Swift: the so-called Brics Pay. To this day, the Swift system remains the code used by the world’s leading banks since 1973.
“[El Brics Pay] It takes into account the use of national currencies and allows trade between countries to be carried out more quickly and less expensively,” said Mauro Vieira, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil at the close of the Kazan summit. This new international payment system will be especially beneficial for Russia, which is banned from using the Swift code after the sanctions adopted for the invasion of Ukraine.
Good relations between Russia and Brazil are drawing criticism. “The bloc tends to align itself more and more with the foreign policy of China and Russia, with an anti-Western aspect,” said Rubem Ricupero, Brazil’s Minister of Economy in 1995, to A Gazeta do Povo. Turkish Daron Acemoglu, 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics and co-author of the book Why countries fail, criticized Lula in an article for encouraging the expansion of the BRICS in a direction that moves away from democracy.
“At a time when many emerging economies face a democratic crisis and a growing number of countries experience a weakening of their democratic institutions, the new BRICS+ threatens to add fuel to the fire,” Acemoglu wrote in an article in which he criticized both the lack of democracy in China and Russia, such as the incorporation of countries like Iran into the bloc.
For her part, Maria Regina Soares de Lima, professor of the postgraduate program in Political Science and International Relations at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), points out in an interview with elDiario.es that the BRICS were not born with the intention of creating an alternative world order: “The group is the result of the globalization of capitalism after the Cold War. For Brazil, the BRICS represent a diversification of its economic insertion with less liberal partners in the economy and more autonomy in the world economic order.”
Maria Regina, one of the leading international relations specialists in Latin America, emphasizes that Brazil does not seek to join an alternative world order. “Although today China is the leader of the BRICS, the Brazilian presence in the group is important so as not to form an alternative field in the economic order. The Brazilian position of blocking the entry of Venezuela as a member of the group shows that the country still has weight,” he says.
Brazil’s veto of Venezuela, also related to the fact that Caracas still has not presented the minutes of the last presidential elections, stages several geopolitical readings. On the one hand, it shows that Brasilia does not welcome the incorporation of countries with such turbulent relations with the West as Venezuela. Javier Milei’s resignation from Argentina’s participation in the BRICS, which had been officially approved in 2023, was a splash of cold water for Brazil. Without Argentina, an ally to reinforce the bridge with Europe and the United States, the BRICS tend to lean towards the Moscow-Beijing axis.
This veto underlines that Brazil’s 2025 presidency will chill any expansion, because it does not want to lose centrality in the bloc. If the number of BRICS members continues to grow, Brazilian influence will wane.
On the other hand, India, the other BRICS member closest to the West, has expressed its categorical refusal to the incorporation of Turkey and its archrival Pakistan, countries with a Muslim majority. As a consequence of both vetoes, countries that aspire to join the BRICS club, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan or Malaysia, will have to settle for the moment with being partner states.
Ecological transition
Brazil has chosen the Amazonian sumauma tree for the logo of its BRICS presidency. The tree, which can reach sixty meters in height, is a visual proposal that, according to the Brazilian Governmentseeks to translate the “diplomatic, socioeconomic and political grandeur of the BRICS.”
In turn, the election highlights another of Lula’s priorities in a year in which Brazil also hosts the UN COP30, the highest summit to address climate issues. Brazil’s environmental priority, apart from making Donald Trump, a declared climate denier, uncomfortable, may generate certain friction with other members of the BRICS. The bloc, if Saudi Arabia is included (which has slowed down its incorporation, among other things, to avoid disturbing not to bother its Western partners like the US)has 43% of the world’s oil reserves, 53% natural gas and 70% coal.
The clash that Brazil wants to dribble is with the United States. “Trump’s election constitutes a real threat to the stability of the world order. With Trump in power, the spaces for Brazil to act on security issues greatly diminish. It is bad for Brazilian aspirations,” says Maria Regina Soares de Lima. If Donald Trump keeps his political promises, the BRICS’ head-on collision with the United States will be inevitable.
Trump has already announced that he is going to raise taxes on imports from Brazil and India, something that could not only provoke reciprocity measures from both countries, but also an increase in the role of the BRICS Development Bank. On the other hand, the unlikely presence of the United States at COP30 and the interference that the country may cause in the G20 (under the presidency of South Africa) could have collateral effects. He America first of Trump, with a European Union restricted to a subordinate role to Washington, could reinforce the Moscow-Beijing axis, while there is a US withdrawal.
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