Sergey Ryabkov, who serves as both Deputy Foreign Minister andBRICSSherpa,recently clarifiedthat
“I would like to remind you that BRICS is not a military union and not a collective security organization with collective defense commitments. It has never been planned as such, and there are no plans to transform it for the purpose.”
“As far as the recent naval exercise in South Africa is concerned, BRICS members participated in it as sovereign nations. It was not a BRICS event.”
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Image: Sergei Ryabkov (CC BY 4.0)
The first part refers to the speculation that BRICS will turn into a security bloc, the goal of which isn’t just absent from its statements but is also very difficult to achieve due to the membership of rival pairs like Egypt-Ethiopia and Iran-UAE. Nevertheless,Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’sfriendPepe Escobarpassed off as fact in an article for publicly financedSputniklast September that “BRICS/SCO will eventually merge in the long term”, thus misleading many folks into thinking that BRICS has SCO-like security goals.
As for the second part of what he said, this relates to the spree of false reports about January’s drills off the South African coast, which many wrongly described as “BRICS naval drills” due to those being the only countries invited to participate. As was explainedhere,
“South Africa allowed this false perception to spread as a symbolic act of defiance against Trump given his hatred of BRICS and to signal to the domestic audience that their country has friends across the world amidst its tensions with the US.”
Ryabkov is one of Russia’s top diplomats, its point man for BRICS, and a potential replacement for Lavrov whenever he retires, so his words about Russian foreign policy carry immense weight. This is especially relevant as regards BRICS, the portrayal of which within Russia’s “global media ecosystem” has hitherto been inordinately shaped by the soft power approach known as “Potemkinism”, or the creation of alternative realities for strategic purposes.
Source: Global Research
