“The world is always changing, and this is attested to by the objective facts of the last five years,” Valdimir Putin said at the BRICS Business Forum.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday drew a comparison between the BRICS grouping of emerging economies and G7 of developed countries, underlining that BRICS contributes more to the global economy. He was speaking at the BRICS Business Forum in New Delhi, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi later cited the same statistics to stress the importance of the group that has grown to 21 members.
Putin said, “Over the last five years, more than 40 per cent of the world GDP (gross domestic product) has been produced by the BRICS countries, whereas the contribution of the so-called G7, the Group of Seven — I don’t know why they call that the Group of Seven — stands at only 29 per cent.”
“The world is always changing, and this is attested to by the objective facts of the last five years,” he noted, speaking in Russian accompanied by an official translation. “Right now the world is undergoing structural, deep, profound shifts… The so-called old leaders, which used to be the vanguard of economic growth, are being replaced by new engines of growth,” he added.
‘Competition Taking Ugly Forms’: Putin Jabs West
He also accused the West in general of sabotaging the development of other economic powers. “We have been told for quite some time that competition is sacrosanct… But our Western competitors are doing everything to get back their erstwhile competitive edge, and sometimes this competition is taking some ugly forms. This is something our colleague from Iran has spoken about,” he said, not naming but apparently referring to the Strait of Hormuz crisis amid the US war on Iran.
“Sometimes, there are measures resorted to of a physical nature, when pipelines are being destroyed, when attempts are undertaken to block international transport corridors, to seize maritime vessels,” he said, and then referred to sanctions imposed on Russia, in the wake of the Ukraine war and otherwise.
“Illegal restrictions are being applied, and there’s also the threat of so-called secondary sanctions against those who do not want to follow someone else’s interests and rather look after their own,” Putin said.
“More than 30,000 sanctions have been slapped on Russia, which is twice the number of all sanctions against all the other countries of the world combined,” he further said, adding, “Against this difficult backdrop, Russia has been working actively, relying on its business, science, education, engineering schools, on our personnel, on Russian citizens, and managed to achieve great success. We have reinforced our national sovereignty; we are developing ties with reliable, predictable partners.”
