DM Monitoring
MOSCOW: Russia, which chairs the BRICS group this year, has called on its partners to create an alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to counter political pressure from Western nations ahead of the BRICS summit later this month.
BRICS, originally comprising Brazil, Russia, India, and China, has expanded to include South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Top BRICS finance and central bank officials are meeting in Moscow this week.
Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, who is hosting the meeting, said the global financial system is controlled by Western countries and that the group, which represents 37% of the global economy, needs to create an alternative.
“The IMF and the World Bank are not performing their roles. They are not working in the interests of BRICS countries,” Siluanov said at an event on the first day of the meeting.
“It is necessary to form new conditions or even new institutions, similar to the Bretton Woods institutions, but within the framework of our community, within the framework of BRICS,” Siluanov added.
Russia had its forex reserves in dollars and euros frozen and its financial system heavily hit by sanctions by the West after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The country is cut off from international capital markets.
Earlier, The Kremlin said that NATO’s annual nuclear exercise involving nuclear-capable military aircraft, which began on Monday, was fuelling tensions in light of the “hot war” unfolding in Ukraine.
NATO was due to begin its annual “Steadfast Noon” nuclear exercise on Monday, the alliance’s Secretary General Mark Rutte said on Thursday, something he cast as a powerful display of deterrence capabilities against a backdrop of heightened nuclear rhetoric from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
F-35A fighter jets and B-52 bombers will be among some 60 aircraft from 13 nations taking part in the exercise, hosted by Belgium and The Netherlands, NATO officials said. “In the conditions of a hot war, which is going on within the framework of the Ukrainian conflict, such exercises lead to nothing but further escalation of tension,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Peskov said it was also impossible to hold nuclear arms talks with the US, something Washington has signalled it is open to, because Western nuclear powers were involved in the conflict against Russia and any security talks would therefore need to be much broader in scope.
US President Joe Biden said after the award of the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday to Nihon Hidankyo, a movement of Japanese survivors of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two, that the US was ready to engage in talks with Russia, China and North Korea without preconditions to reduce the nuclear threat.
“In the context of the war that is being waged against Russia with the indirect and even direct involvement of nuclear powers such as the United States, Great Britain and France, it is absolutely impossible to talk about this without linking the issue to all other aspects of security,” said Peskov.
