BRICS Leaders Want Peace in Ukraine, but on Putin’s Terms. Russia Raises the Pressure on the (Un)Collective West
The BRICS summit in India has just wrapped up, and it was a remarkably effective one: unified, and unmistakably assertive in the geoeconomic signals it sent. It was held in India, a country the US-Israel axis still hopes to keep playing both sides, from within BRICS and within the Shanghai security bloc alike. And yes, India is indeed playing a double game, but this time purely in its own national interest, an interest that now hinges above all on its cooperation with the governments of Putin and Xi. Of one thing I am certain: India, like China, has not forgotten the centuries of humiliation and exploitation it suffered at the hands of the Collective West. That West is no longer exactly the one that plundered them back then, the British, the Dutch and the rest, but it is still around, still close, and in any case what we are really talking about is capital, the great global financial power. You will hear all the details and implications of this summit on Thursday, on Geopolitics Day at Gold FM, in Daria Gușă’s programmes; she published an excellent editorial today, and I say excellent not because she is my daughter but because it genuinely is, on American corruption and deceit twenty-five years after 9/11.
Here is what stands out to me about this summit. For the first time since the war began, the leaders of Iran and the United Arab Emirates sat at the same table, brought there by the BRICS leadership, both being full members of the bloc. Pezeshkian and the Emirates’ Mohammed bin Zayed sat down together and talked. How did that happen? I will tell you. Bin Zayed was handed a gift: the offer to host Russia’s peace negotiations with Ukraine and the United States in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Putin agreed to hold them in the Emirates, which amounts to a hugely significant show of external support for a country left in a fragile economic state after the damage done by Israel’s war in the Middle East, a war that has drained the UAE of investors and residents alike.
The other thing worth noting is this: every BRICS leader other than Putin, from Xi Jinping on down, agreed to send the message of “peace in Ukraine,” but, crucially, on the terms laid out by their comrade Vladimir Putin. That is a major win for Putin and for Russia. And it was followed, from the BRICS podium, by a speech from Putin that was measured in tone yet all the more menacing for the uncollective West. His argument, in essence: it is a lie that Russia wants to expand its territory or its holdings; it seeks to expand nowhere, because it already has enough. But European military troops in Ukraine, he warned, would mean that the states sending them there want war with Russia, and Russia will give them exactly that. He urged those governments to take responsibility, and to ask their own citizens whether they truly want war with Russia, noting that Germany’s voters, at their recent election, made clear they did not. Sergei Lavrov picked up the same thread, in his blunt and equally chilling way: there could well be a war between Russia and a Western NATO stripped of America, he said, but he warned it would be a very short one. Lavrov’s point was to underscore, once again, the vast superiority of the Russian war machine over that of a Collective West without the United States. It sounds like something out of a horror film, and yet the military reality bears it out.
Finally, recall that only days ago, as we reported on Solid News, the head of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, issued his own warning to the world: the Thucydides Trap, he said, is less a prediction than a warning. Those familiar with the concept know its logic, that the rising power challenging the dominant one tends, in the end, to win. What Naryshkin is really signalling, and note this carefully, is that Russia now sees itself fighting the West on behalf of all the emerging powers, the former colonies gathered in BRICS, the very nations the Collective West exploited for centuries. That West is today an uncollective one, because it can no longer count on American solidarity; the United States now plays its own individualist game, its so-called balancing act.
So what should you take from all this? That in India, Russia effectively secured BRICS’s blessing to increase the military pressure on the uncollective West. And I assure you it will do exactly that, because applying pressure is precisely what Putin and his circle do best.
