Vladimir Putin says Russian city of Kazan will host Brics summit in 2024

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Vladimir Putin said the 2024 Brics summit would be held in the Russian city of Kazan, as China’s Xi Jinping urged the leaders of the emerging-markets bloc meeting at this year’s event in Johannesburg to speed up the pace of expansion.

Russia’s president spoke via video link on Wednesday after skipping the summit following the International Criminal Court’s war crimes charges against him in March, telling the gathering he would seek to strengthen the bloc’s role and authority under his chairmanship.

Russia holding the Brics summit next year will be a boost for Moscow’s attempts to show that it has not been isolated over Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, especially among countries of the Global South.

Xi’s call for faster expansion of the Brics group comes as Beijing seeks to forge the bloc into a bigger rival to the G7. “We should let more countries join the Brics family and pool wisdom to make global governance more fair and reasonable,” he told the Brics summit on Wednesday.

However, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi stressed the need for consensus among the five members of the Brics club on admitting new members.

Modi told the gathering that India “fully supports the expansion of Brics membership” but also stressed that “we welcome moving forward on this based on consensus”, reflecting New Delhi’s counter-push for a more phased and gradual enlistment of members.

Xi and Modi have each held bilateral meetings at the summit with the host, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa. But they have so far not met each other one-on-one at the summit for what would be their first formal meeting since the worst Sino-Indian border skirmishes in years erupted in 2020. The leaders of the world’s two most populous nations spoke at last year’s G20 event but have not had a scheduled bilateral meeting since 2019.

The Brics countries have received formal expressions of interest from Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and 20 other countries to become the group’s first members since South Africa joined in 2010.

Ramaphosa said “we stand at the cusp of expanding the Brics family” as discussions on membership continued behind closed doors on Wednesday.

Officials have said the summit’s main outcome could be a deal on criteria for new members, leaving actual additions to be approved at a future summit.

Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, said on Wednesday that these criteria had been developed in outline and leaders would make a more detailed announcement by the summit’s end on Thursday.

“We have a document that we have adopted that sets out the guidelines and principles, processes for considering countries that wish to become members of the Brics,” she added.

The summit is also set to announce further steps on the Brics economies using their own currencies to settle trade with each other instead of through the US dollar. “We will continue discussions on practical measures to facilitate trade and investment flows through the increased use of local currencies,” Ramaphosa said. 

Given China’s clout as the bloc’s main exporter and biggest economy, this effort was likely to focus on the renminbi, analysts said.

Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said that he favours Argentina’s entry into the Brics, but Brazil is seen alongside India as being relatively cautious about a rapid expansion of the Brics membership that might dilute their position as the bloc’s biggest democracies.

Brazil was originally set to host the 2024 Brics summit, but swapped places with Russia in the rotating chairmanship to avoid a clash with its hosting of next year’s G20 meeting.