The world was recently shown yet one more example of this simple fact that the leadership of Russia cannot be trusted in anything. Neither politics, nor economy. We in Ukraine have already seen very many painful examples of this.
But the world has learned yet another lesson in Kremlins’ treachery at the recently ended summit in Kazan, Russia.
The Russian leadership went into that summit with two objectives.
First, to get the other nations to sign off on its agenda of aggression against Ukraine, which aims at the geographic dismemberment of the sovereign state, and the political and cultural destruction of the Ukrainian people.
Second was the creation of an alternative global payment system independent of the existing Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system.
But in the end, the summit only served to prove, first, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not only doomed to fail in purely military terms, but more broadly, it is against the tide of history, as many of the countries which have already joined the BRICS, - informal group of states comprising the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Russian Federation, the Republic of India, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of South Africa- or indicated an interest in doing so, have refused to follow the lead of a country like Russia, which is determined to take the world back to the 18th and 19th centuries: a dark age of colonialism in its wildest form. And second, that the proposed BRICS alternative global payment system, is at the present time, even less than a pipe dream.
Concerning the invasion of Ukraine, the refusal to follow Russia’s geopolitical lead was revealed in the final declaration of this summit.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine has drawn attention to Paragraph 36 of the final declaration of the BRICS summit in Kazan dedicated to Ukraine, in which its participants merely recalled their national positions, their commitments to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, as well as to peaceful settlement and diplomacy.
This text shows that Russia, subject to one man’s arbitrary decisions and futile delusions, failed to “export” to the other nations its neo-imperialist views on changing the world order and global security architecture through its aggression against Ukraine.
Most of the BRICS countries support the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, as also stated in the declaration.
Such support is incompatible with the support for aggression or changing borders by force, and therefore incompatible with support for Russia and its war of aggression against Ukraine.
Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is a violation of several key agreements and treaties which were supposed to protect Ukraine from just such aggression. These include the United Nations Charter and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 in which Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. Signing this Memorandum turned to be yet another Russian lie, as no treaty signed with Moscow is worth the paper it is written on.
Now, as concerns the proposed new global financial system, the signs were clear from very early on that it was not considered as a serious option by any nation within this format, other than Russia.
This option, advertised in media prior to the summit, was not even discussed seriously.
And one more thing: Russia, a country that was trying to flirt with the free-market economies, claimed it has the instruments to promote a cheaper credit, competing with the IMF and the World Bank.
On the very same day, however, at the end of BRICS summit, Russian Central Bank raised its key rate to 21 per cent. It is almost twice as much as Kenya’s Central Bank’s lending rate.
With no cheap credit available and the alternative payment system being merely a dream, Russia has once again proved to be a failed state in terms of market economy and its desire to become a leader in the club of countries whose main goal is to develop and prosper.