Vladimir Putin has defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and sought to rally leaders of the Brics nations meeting in South Africa to the Kremlin’s side.
In a prerecorded video message aired on Tuesday to the leaders of Brazil, India, China and South Africa, Putin repeated his earlier unfounded claims that the west was responsible for the war in Ukraine.
“Our actions in Ukraine are dictated by only one thing – to end the war that was unleashed by the west and its satellites against the people who live in the Donbas,” Putin said, referring to the eastern part of Ukraine where Russian proxies have been fighting the Ukrainian army since 2014.
“I want to note that it was the desire to maintain their hegemony in the world, the desire of some countries to maintain this hegemony that led to the severe crisis in Ukraine,” he added.
Putin was the only leader of the five-nation Brics summit not to attend in person and spoke instead by video because he faces an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the international criminal court (ICC).
In the run-up to the summit, South Africa, which was party to the treaty that created the ICC and would have been obliged to arrest Putin if he had travelled there, had asked the Russian leader to stay away.
The Russian president also accused the west of sabotaging the Black Sea grain deal that his country exited last month.
The grain deal proved key for stabilising global food price, a topic of serious concern to many developing countries, including those in the bloc.
The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who earlier in the summer presented Putin with an African peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, said in response to the Russian president’s speech that Brics members would continue to support efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Ramaphosa also called for the resumption of the grain deal.
The Brics countries represent about 40% of the world’s population and a quarter of global GDP, but the group is considering expansion. Leaders from more than 40 countries, largely from Africa and elsewhere in the global south, flew in for the three-day summit in Johannesburg alongside Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, China’s Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi of India.
According to the South African organisers, many of those countries have expressed interest in joining – though there had been divisions among the Brics leaders over how many and how quickly. South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, on Wednesday said an agreement had been made on expansion and a more detailed announcement would follow before the end of the summit.
“We have agreed on the matter of expansion,” she told Ubuntu Radio, a station run by South Africa’s foreign ministry. “We have a document that we’ve adopted which sets out guidelines and principles, processes for considering countries that wish to become members of Brics ... That’s very positive.”
However, analysts have questioned Putin’s assertion that the Brics bloc will soon grow to represent the “global majority”.
“Even if other countries are ultimately welcomed to the new group, it remains unlikely that this will be a genuine challenge to the international order,” said Maximilian Hess, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute thinktank and a political risks consultant based in London.
“That is because none of the Brics countries except for Russia seek a direct confrontation with America and its allies. Given the perilous state many Brics economies currently find themselves in, antagonising Washington risks adding fuel to the fire,” Hess added.
In a clear sign the bloc’s members are wary of the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine, its flagship New Development Bank (NDB) has suspended all operations in Moscow out of fear of having sanctions imposed by the west. The Brics nations set up the NDB in 2015 as a counterweight to US-dominated financial institutions such as the World Bank.
