Kremlin says it would be inappropriate for France’s president to crash the meeting.
By Ali Walker
June 22, 2023
The Kremlin isn’t impressed with French President Emmanuel Macron’s bid to crash the BRICS summit in South Africa later this summer.
“We sent a signal that, with all due respect to the prerogatives of the host country, inviting certain guests should be based on the fact that BRICS is an association of states that, in principle, reject unilateral sanctions as a method of solving foreign policy problems,” Sergey Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said Thursday according to state-owned news agency TASS.
“Considering this, the inappropriateness of the appearance of representatives of the collective West there is simply obvious,” Ryabkov added.
South Africa will host the next summit of BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, all of which remain close to Moscow despite the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — in Johannesburg on August 22-24.
The BRICS group of large emerging economies is the Global South’s answer to the G7 group of Western industrialized countries.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also shrugged at Macron’s push for an invite from South Africa. “We honestly don’t know how, as whom, for what purpose [Macron could participate in the summit], we don’t have such information,” Peskov said.
Macron — whose personal involvement in French foreign policy has gone to a new level since the start of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine — would be the first Western leader to attend a BRICS summit.
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