Skipping out

While Xi’s absence — his first since 2012 — was officially attributed to a “scheduling conflict”, it was widely believed that the guest of honour status being accorded to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the real reason the Chinese president chose to stay away. 

By contrast, the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine almost certainly played a role in his decision not to attend the event in person, despite Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s assurances that Brasilia would not act on the arrest warrant, despite Brazil’s legal obligation to do so. 

Putin’s absence was notable as he usually relishes any opportunity to thumb his nose at the “collective West” and to lay bare its failure to totally isolate Russia from the international community, and yet he clearly felt that travelling to Brazil was too risky at this time.

Though the flight from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro would have required him to transit the airspace of multiple ICC member states, arguably the real reason for Putin’s reluctance to make the journey was the prospect of Ukrainian foul play, following a spate of successful attacks and targeted assassinations by Ukrainian intelligence agencies. 

Though Moscow sees the Trump administration’s episodic halting of military aid to Ukraine and its frustration at what it perceives as the freeloading of its NATO allies as tactical wins, the lack of a coherent Western policy on the war has led Kyiv increasingly to take matters into its own hands, as multiple high-profile assassinations of senior Russian military figures in recent months have demonstrated. 

Aside from fearing for his own life or a future behind bars, though, Putin also appears reluctant to confront the harsh truth that BRICS itself has become a failed geopolitical experiment despite its recent expansion, which saw the group’s five original members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — joined by Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. 

The expansion of the group has meant that its already significant intra-member disputes have become even more pronounced. Chief among them is the deeply strained Sino-Indian relationship, with the two countries’ long-running border dispute in the Himalayas showing no sign of resolution, not to mention tensions over the safe haven India has granted to the separatist Central Tibetan Administration, or China’s cosy ties with Pakistan, whose claim to Kashmir has long been a thorn in New Delhi’s side. 

In the past, Putin has used BRICS summits as a platform to play the peacemaker between the two Asian giants in an attempt to breathe new life into the so-called Primakov Doctrine — a nexus of global influence theorised by former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov in the 1990s that was to be made up of Russia, India and China as a counterweight to US power in the post-Cold War era. 

This time around, Putin may have accepted that bridging the ideological divide between Beijing and New Delhi was a lost cause given the Modi government’s silent endorsement of the Dalai Lama’s succession plans, coupled with Pakistan deploying Chinese-made Chengdu J-10 fighter jets in its most recent standoff with India. 

China’s “no limits” alliance with the Kremlin notwithstanding, when push comes to shove, the Chinese Communist Party has shown its readiness to abandon its increasingly toxic partner. The fact that up to 98% of Chinese banks now decline all transactions with Russia and have been actively offloading Russian assets since coming under pressure to do so from the US Treasury Department last summer is a case in point. 

India is also second-guessing the rationale behind throwing the Russians a lifeline in their hour of need, and by doing so, subjecting itself to diplomatic isolation. As well as Moscow’s tepid response to the Pahalgam massacre in April, its double dealings with Islamabad have enraged New Delhi. It’s worth recalling that Russia has also endorsed Pakistan’s inclusion in BRICS and has ramped up energy exports as well as weapons supplies to a country it has deemed its “natural ally” over the past few years. 

Scepticism over Moscow’s reliability as an ally is not limited to China and India, however, but extends to other members of the grouping as well. The most obvious example is Iran, which in return for arming and equipping Russia with advanced Shahed drones, spare aircraft parts and engineering know-how vital for the continued prosecution of its war in Ukraine, was effectively hung out to dry by the Kremlin during the recent Israeli and US attacks on its cities and nuclear installations. 

The Kremlin’s inaction when its ally was attacked demonstrated that the comprehensive strategic partnership signed with such fanfare by both countries earlier this year is hardly worth the paper it was written on. Meanwhile, the blatant victimisation of Central Asian guest workers by the Russian authorities since last year’s terror attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall has not gone unnoticed by countries in the Islamic world.

Though Putin had his reasons for not wanting to rub shoulders with some of his fellow BRICS leaders in Rio last weekend, preferring instead to address them remotely, he nevertheless grossly underestimated the optics of not being present at the annual meeting of what is essentially his own vanity project. 

Already suffering a legitimacy crisis and struggling to make any real headway on its stated aim of replacing the dollar as the default global trading currency, the BRICS grouping would appear to be facing a bleak future if the absence of its two most powerful leaders is anything to go by.