In an article posted on Feb. 14 to the Russian Embassy website, and posted as an interview with Newsweek Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov points to Russia’s active role in the BRICS, as this year’s chairman, and warns that the international community’s efforts to isolate Russia have failed, overtaken by momentum toward a multipolar world and the expansion of the BRICS process. Five countries became full-fledged members on Jan. 1, and another thirty are in line to become members or partners of the bloc. Moscow’s goal, the ambassador stressed, “is to enhance and bolster BRICS’ role and weight as a center of gravity for countries seeking to pursue an independent foreign policy course.”
The BRICS process is most attractive for those nations that “do not want to live under someone else’s dictate and aspire to be on friendly terms with the rest of the world,” Antonov explained. Many BRICS initiatives have succeeded in reducing the influence of the U.S. dollar, for example, by creating new mechanisms of development assistance to countries seeking an alternative to Western-led institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank. The BRICS New Development Bank is key in this process, he noted, as it encourages members’ trade using national currencies, and addresses other challenges associated with the dollar-denominated financial system.
Many nations have realized that the approaches of the current economic and financial architecture, in which a few countries try to dictate their will to others, are very harmful and contribute to global financial instability. To counter this, Russia and its partners are committed to “uniting our resources to design new financial instruments independent from political trends in Washington, Brussels or London, where authorities are ready to neglect national legislative provisions and postulates of international law in order to punish insufficiently loyal partners.”
