🚨Russia recruits nine countries for BRICS but fails to convince Two big countries 🚨

Russia, in the final days of its BRICS chairmanship, has succeeded in recruiting nine new partner countries for the geopolitical bloc but has failed to secure deals with key targets such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Despite months of effort from Russian leaders, the Saudi and Turkish governments are both still stalling their decisions on invitations to affiliate with the bloc, in which Russia and China play leading roles.

Turkey’s decision has been closely watched because it would have been the first member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to be associated with BRICS.

The BRICS group has emerged as a rising rival to the Western-dominated G7 group of countries in recent years. The nine-member bloc, which represents almost half of the world’s population and about a quarter of the global economy, is working on a new global payments system to bypass Western sanctions in the banking sector.

The group’s name is an acronym for its earliest members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It expanded last year to include Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.

On Wednesday, nine new countries will join the bloc as partner states – one level below full membership – when Russia hands over the rotating BRICS leadership to Brazil, officials in Moscow said last week. The new partners are Indonesia, Malaysia, Cuba, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, Thailand and Uganda.

But four other countries – Turkey, Nigeria, Vietnam and Algeria – were invited to become partner states at the latest BRICS summit in October and have not accepted so far. None has stated publicly any reasons for the decision.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, was invited to become a full member of the bloc in 2023, and Moscow had publicly counted the oil-rich country as a member. But later, the Saudi government said it was still considering the matter, and it has now decided to suspend its decision, Russian officials said last week.

Patrick Bond, a scholar at the University of Johannesburg who studies BRICS, wrote this weekend that Western pressure is probably one reason why some of the countries have not accepted the BRICS invitation.

In a sign of growing Western unease with the fast-growing bloc, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump last month threatened to impose tariffs of 100 per cent on imports from BRICS countries if the group does anything to weaken the U.S. dollar’s traditional dominance in global trade.

“We require a commitment from these countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty U.S. dollar, or they will face 100-per-cent tariffs,” Mr. Trump said in a social-media post on Nov. 30.

In fact, the creation of a BRICS currency is extremely unlikely and could only be a long-term possibility, the bloc’s members say. Instead, they are hoping that a growing share of trade among BRICS members can be conducted in the national currencies of its member states rather than the U.S. dollar.

Over the past year, Russia has exploited its role as chair of BRICS to forge closer relations with dozens of Global South countries. It held more than 250 events in Russia for BRICS members and other interested countries and businesses.

Despite its failure to secure deals with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others, Moscow still seems pleased with the results of its lobbying efforts. “BRICS has become extremely popular,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told journalists last week.

He noted that 35 countries had sent delegations to the BRICS summit in Russia in October. “This high level of attendance demonstrates how important this structure has become and that there is a growing interest for forging closer ties with BRICS.”

Countries such as Saudi Arabia, however, are reluctant to join an organization that could antagonize Washington. “Saudi Arabia cannot risk alienating China or Russia, but it also cannot afford to burden its relationships with the West by in any way endorsing China and Russia’s attempts to build an anti-Western bloc,” scholars Oliver Stuenkel and Margot Treadwell wrote in an analysis for the Carnegie Endowment last month.

“Instead, Saudi Arabia has chosen a tricky balancing act of an ambiguous approach to BRICS that leaves it room to adapt to changing global conditions, including the coming U.S. leadership change.”

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