Russia at War: The Consequences for Great Power Politics, the BRICS and the Global South

DOI: 10.58867/SYTZ6473

Great power competition, the hardening of the U.S.-China rivalry, and worsening tensions between Russia and the West following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, had already strained international governance and multilateral institutions like the BRICS even before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.[1] Now in its third year, the Kremlin perceives it has turned the tide in its fight against Ukraine, foiling Western plans to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia.[2] Many experts in the United States and Europe worry not only about a possible Russian victory of varying scales against Ukraine, the bleak transformation of European security, and Putin’s recurring mentions of how the war could escalate into a civilization-ending nuclear conflict. There are also fears that such confident and aggressive rhetoric may next be heard in support of armed conflicts initiated by Beijing on the other side of the world.[3]

The consequences of Russia’s war further intensify international competition, deepening existing cleavages while fostering convergence within blocs in both the East and the West. NATO is accelerating efforts to strengthen collective defense and has quickly expanded to include Finland and Sweden. Russia similarly stretched its alignments to include North Korea and Iran while also deepening economic and military cooperation with China. The Sino-Russian partnership is one that both countries claim has never been better, anchored by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who have personally invested in and built a resilient relationship that brings benefits to both sides, even if it is not without limits and boundaries. There is also an emerging Sino-Russian axis with North Korea and Iran that Moscow has been exploiting to assist its war effort. Although none of these relationships are without fissures that could widen and rupture as they have in the past,[4] the current material benefits loom large for Moscow, which unlike Beijing, has largely been cut off from the West.

Strikingly, the rest of the world resists being drawn into taking sides, with individual countries pursuing instead transactional interests while preserving as much autonomy to maneuver as possible. Despite this, the Global South has proved more responsive to Russia and China’s courting, counter-norms, and inducements than the West. To a significant degree, Putin and Xi act as “fear dictators” in their respective countries. Still, they remain impactful “spin dictators” across the Global South and in selected other places.[5] Thus, despite the overwhelming majority of UN member states that voted in March 2022 to condemn Russian aggression, only about 30 are imposing sanctions against Moscow or otherwise supporting Ukraine. In the UN vote, 40 countries with different views of Russia and the current international order opposed or abstained, and among the 35 abstentions were G20/BRICS members China, India, and South Africa. More than a year later, a majority (57 percent) of Indians, whose government refrains from condemning Russia’s war continues to hold a favorable opinion of Russia.[6]

This article explores Russia’s strategies and policies related to the BRICS context to protect and advance the regime and national interests in the new era of competitive great power rivalries.

BRICS are Non-Western and Counter-Hegemonic, But Divided about an Anti-Western Orientation

When Vladimir Putin repurposed Goldman Sachs’ BRICs idea into a multilateral club for large emerging economic powers, geoeconomic and geopolitical drivers were deeply rooted in its structural foundations. In the first decade of the 21^st century when Russia started to organize informal caucuses, the balance of power and the structure of international order were still dominated by the United States and its Western partners. China was growing but not yet an economic powerhouse while Russia was a major energy exporter to Europe and prided itself as one of the top ten emerging global economies. The Kremlin’s geopolitical strategy featured two critical vectors of Russian foreign policy, the traditional arena in Europe and the Global West where strategic and economic stakes loomed large, and the other to the East where a rising China was starting to transform and energize Asia’s regional economies.

When the original four founding BRICs members began to assert themselves in global governance, their common interests were relatively thin given varying domestic and economic profiles. But their common aversions to U.S. hegemony and hypocrisy ran deep, even among fellow democracies Brazil and India as all had experienced the long arm of U.S. sanctions and coercive diplomacy and held grievances about their respective status and roles in the international order and Bretton Woods Institutions.[7] Following the Global Financial Crisis 2008-9, the United States was perceived to be declining in power and status, exposed by its misdeeds, double standards and regulatory scandals originating with the U.S. subprime mortgage markets and American-style crony capitalism.[8] The BRICS cleverly parlayed such self-inflicted U.S. wounds and the increasing use of Western (non-UN authorized) sanctions swords into a global narrative about the world’s need to “democratize international relations” led by the self-appointed emerging economic powers, the BRICS. The priorities were to de-dollarize, increase the role of BRICS local currencies, and build parallel financial institutions while gaining more voice and rule-making power in the existing order. Some Russian and Indian elites even optimistically hoped that multilateral groups like the BRICS could help bind China.[9]

The return of great power competition and intensifying U.S.-China rivalry in the mid-2010s strains such diverse multilateral institutions as it stresses international relations,[10] but the BRICS approach to geopolitics has been bifurcated. First, in the whole group, the five BRICS have succeeded by putting conflicts (such as security and territorial disputes between China and India) to one side, focusing on consensus-based decision-making and largely non-controversial cooperation in arenas where it is possible.[11] The results have led to greater institutionalization, including the creation of the BRICS New Development Bank, a Contingency Reserve Agreement, interlinked payments systems, and initiatives to promote de-dollarization through trade in local currencies and digital currencies. Russia has occasionally attempted to build support for its geopolitical interests by proposing anti-Western initiatives, but Brazil and other BRICS members have so far nixed such overtures.

Second, the BRICS is an elite club where some members are more privileged than others (e.g. by simultaneously holding valuable permanent memberships in the U.N. Security Council) and can pursue more controversial initiatives in alternative fora. Club-within-the-club rivalries[12] create underlying tensions as some of these subgroups pursue narrow common interests not shared by other members. These vary from Sino-Russian alignment in containing U.S. and Western democracy promotion initiatives that they perceive as threatening their regimes to China’s (and now Russia’s) push to enlarge BRICS to further geoeconomic and geopolitical interests. The elite members are disincentivized to dilute their power in other institutions where they value other elite pacts while favoring an expansion of the BRICS brand.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and its failure to rapidly achieve the aims of regime change and subordination of Ukraine, radically changed the equation for Moscow. First and foremost, Russia sought to demonstrate strength and resolve while it struggled to adapt to the abject failure of its initial war plan. Putin, like past Russian leaders, lives by the motto, “the weak get beaten.” The Kremlin had prepared for economic sanctions, but not a long war that could require the military mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men and material over a dragged-out fight. It prioritized partners who were able and willing to provide concrete assistance, not only rhetorical and diplomatic boosts in multilateral forums but also exploiting all opportunities to make end-runs around punitive Western sanctions and boost competing financial mechanisms and networks.

Russia is Resilient, and Neither its Economy nor its Military is Collapsing

The immediate cost of Russia’s war in blood and treasure was shocking in comparison with Russia’s recent limited conflicts, with an estimated 300,000 casualties and reportedly 800,000 well-educated, young men rushing into exile during the first two years. Over the medium to long term, the outlook for Russia’s potential growth is expected to worsen given the regime’s failure to diversify and modernize the economy, poor demographics, and underinvestment.[13]

However, Washington and the European Union (EU) underestimated Russia’s ability to prepare for increased sanctions by accumulating a huge reservoir of reserves, scaling up the “Fortress Russia” strategy, adapting with skillful policy responses, and recovering from the initial economic and military disasters. The IMF estimates that the Russian economy will grow 3 percent in 2023 and predicts 2.6 percent growth in 2024. Russia has been running a “hot” war economy with defense spending tripling since the start of the invasion in 2022 and now approaching 8 percent of national output. Energy revenues still power the economy as oil and gas revenues increased 28 percent from 2021 but were insufficient to cover sizeable spending increases in 2022 and 2023, requiring a drawdown of nearly $50 billion from the national wealth funds and a record 3 trillion-ruble domestic debt issuance to cover the 2023 federal budget deficit of roughly 3.2 trillion rubles ($37 billion) amounting to about 2 percent of GDP.[14]

Sanctions indisputably have imposed high costs on Russia and blowback against Europe. Still, Russia has proved more determined and cleverer in evading restrictions, more able to rely on a web of countries reluctant to cut ties, and more resilient than many coalition policymakers expected. Moscow also resolutely made firm macroeconomic adjustments to right the economy after the initial shock and found means to circumvent controls, restore advantages in manpower, materiel, and defense production, and do whatever it took, including throwing tens of thousands of conscripted convicts into the meat grinder in the front lines. 

One is frequently reminded of the Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck’s observation that lack of capital would not make Russia more peaceful. Bismarck only partly exaggerates when he claims that the Russians would “spend the necessary money for railways and wars whether they have it or not.”[15] Liberal finance ministers—from Mikhail von Reutern (under Alexander II) to Aleksei Kudrin (under Putin) have repeatedly failed to restrain the nexus of interests pushing protectionist, military-industrial and imperial expansion. The current logrolled domestic coalition supporting Putin ominously may also include Russia’s nuclear sector and the nationalist hawks that denounce the U.S. for seeking Russia’s ‘strategic defeat’ and advocate for direct action against the West.[16] It’s not unimaginable, for example, that the Kremlin is rethinking the cost-benefit scenarios of nuclear proliferation and will decide that support for Iran’s nuclear ambitions is justified payback against the West, poses little risk to Russia and is reasonable compensation for Tehran’s military support. 

Even in the Western world, Moscow has proven adept at limiting damage from restrictions on Russian oil and other natural resource purchases. In 2023, the European Union added €1 billion to Russia’s war chest through fuel purchases despite sweeping bans on Russian oil.[17] Similarly, a Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) project subject to U.S. sanctions was resurrected with Chinese expertise filling the technical and logistical void left by Western companies.[18]Russia and its suppliers have also adroitly exploited globalized supply chains and third countries to acquire critical technology, even from Western manufacturers, and access dual-use components for its weapons.[19] Russia further reduced its vulnerabilities, including to a partial cutoff from SWIFT (the Belgium-based cooperative connecting global banks), through new and adapted institutions in domestic payments systems, trade in local currencies and greater digitalization while other actors successfully pursued non-compliance and means to evade sanctions.

Despite a consensus among Washington elites to the contrary, it was foreseeable that the threat of punishing sanctions would be unlikely to deter a major power from taking actions its leadership viewed as both necessary and wholly feasible, regardless of the fact they later proved costly miscalculations.[20] Likewise, even unprecedented sanctions, such as those levied against Russia, and weaponizing Western financial channels like SWIFT and Euroclear (a Belgium depository for global securities) to cut out Russian banks and immobilize $300 billion of Russian central bank reserves are unlikely to successfully coerce a major power to back down or completely isolate a large economy integrated into global markets. 

Nor will such punitive actions escape blowback effects ranging from fueling resentment, evasion and possible counter-measures against the West.[21] They partially backfire by accelerating financial fragmentation as targeted states like Russia, China, and other BRICS (now including Iran) shift to alternative sanctions-proofed financial mechanisms that better protect their assets despite transaction costs. Such mechanisms include changes in domestic payments systems, trade in local currencies and greater digitalization which do not constitute de-dollarization but do limit the future impact of the West’s ability to weaponize financial networks.[22] Moreover, China benefits from expanding the role of the renminbi (RMB) through renminbi clearing banks, Peoples Bank of China bilateral swap lines, and the Chinese Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) as BRICS and other countries increasingly use these instruments. Renminbi trade even between third parties, such as Russia and India, is facilitated without China having to increase RMB convertibility and end capital controls. Reportedly 30 Russian banks are already indirect participants in CIPS and in the first three quarters of 2023 70 percent of Russia-China trade was settled in RMB.[23]  Also worth noting, a year before it joined the BRICS in 2024, the United Arab Emirates started taking payments in RMB from China and rupees from India instead of U.S. dollars to settle oil and gas transactions. 

Looking back on the failure of the Biden administration’s inflated deterrent and coercive threats to deliver desired results against Moscow and the lack of an “obvious knock-out blow that coercive statecraft” could inflict on China (absent “severe collateral damage”) is sobering. One senior participant acknowledges that “more than two-thirds of the world’s population lives in countries that have not joined the sanctions coalition [against Russia].” Whether such recent warnings against overreach in deploying “economic statecraft” will be heeded while others were brushed aside remains to be seen.[24]

Russia is Not Isolated in the World Arena

Internationally, Russia’s war caused a sharp break with the West, which rallied to Ukraine’s side, but not with the rest of the world despite second-order effects such as reduced Ukrainian agricultural exports like wheat and grains that contributed to a global food crisis. In fact, Russian elites maintain that “relations with the ‘World Majority countries’ have proved to be Russia’s most important foreign policy asset.”[25]

One of the most important consequences of Russia’s war has been to elevate the already strong Sino-Russian partnership and coalesce previously secondary players like Iran and North Korea into a nascent bloc even if not a happy family from Beijing’s point of view. China is now Russia’s largest trade partner, surpassing the European Union, with trade exceeding $200bn in 2023.[26] China has also significantly expanded the volume of manufactured goods and technologies – from heavy trucks and digging equipment to ball bearings and silicon chips – it is supplying that are vital to Russia’s war effort even as it appears to avoid directly sending “lethal aid.”[27]

India also made public and unapologetic displays of not cutting off Moscow and maintaining a neutral transactional stance, despite growing ties with the United States, and the Biden administration’s effort to convince New Delhi to join the anti-Russia coalition. India’s energy trade with Russia skyrocketed, as it increased Russia’s share in its total oil imports to 35 percent in 2023, from 2 percent before the war, and this helped total trade reach almost $50 billion in 2023. India also boasted that it’s refinement of Russian crude oil and exports to Europe and other countries were a stabilizing factor in the global oil market.[28] The Russia-India defense trade has fared less well given sanctions and constraints on Russia’s ability to supply weapons. Going forward the India-Russia partnership may also be negatively impacted by Moscow’s need to prioritize relations with China which asymmetrically dominates both bilateral and BRICS relationships.

None of the other BRICS, including Russia, Xi’s best friend, or the four new BRICS members, are linchpin states[29] for China’s hegemonic ambitions, meaning they are not indispensable and their preferences that run against China’s are likely to be ignored when Beijing is strongly motivated, such as in enlarging the group. On the other hand, China as well as North Korea and Iran, Russia’s new supporters in a nascent anti-Western axis, are pivotal partners for the Kremlin at war, but not indispensable in the sense of having the potential “to pull the wheels off and undermine it.”[30] Seeking significant material support for its war, Moscow drew closer to Pyongyang as Beijing has been unwilling to provide direct lethal aid despite Russia’s requests for military equipment. North Korea rapidly restored a mutually beneficial relationship supplying more than 1000 containers of long-range artillery shells needed for the war in Ukraine. In July 2023, the two countries defense ministers pledged to expand military cooperation to “resolutely stand against” their “common enemy,” the United States. Subsequently, at a September summit with Putin in Russia, Kim Jong Un toasted the Kremlin’s “sacred struggle” against “a [Western] band of evil” and Putin as the “Korean people’s closest friend.”[31] In return, Russia has provided food aid, fighter aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, and equipment for ballistic missile production that probably helped Pyongyang test launch a sophisticated ICBM in July 2023 and deploy its first military reconnaissance satellite in November. Between North Korea and Iran, Russia has reportedly purchased one to three million artillery rounds, while succeeding in scaling up its own production of 122-millimeter and 152-millimeter artillery shells to two million by the end of 2024.[32]

Likewise, despite mistrust and Iran’s revolutionary Shiite ideology, Moscow and Tehran believe they have a common enemy in Washington. Russia will increase its engagement with Tehran in multilateral institutions now that it has joined the BRICS (and before that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) while continuing to cooperate bilaterally against the United States militarily in Syria. As Moscow repeatedly claims to be fighting against the United States in Ukraine, the next logical step was the expansion of the sale of military technologies, including Russian military aviation for thousands of Iranian attack drones, notably the Shahed-101s and the more advanced Shahed-107s.[33]

The world that Russia is now navigating is not a replica of the Cold War, but a more complicated version of the variegated multipolar arenas that existed before and between the world wars. It is even more dangerous as this emerging variant involves power shifts along multiple dimensions, including high technology and nuclear weapons. It is also increasingly becoming unmoored from stabilizing institutionalized arrangements in arms control, trade and finance, some of which, as noted above in global financial fragmentation and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, are being sidelined by alternative non-Western – and sometimes anti-Western – institutions that will increase international polarization and strains. 

BRICS Enlargement and Russia’s Revisionist Partners Tilt towards Anti-Western Coalitions?

China is now the de facto driver of the BRICS, but Russia remains one of its principal beneficiaries, given the active efforts by the United States and the West to sanction and isolate Russia. None of the BRICS favors such isolation, partly because they reject on principle sanctions not passed by the UN and also because of their pragmatic self-interests, that Russia promotes, from oil and arms to India and China to fertilizer sales to Brazil which in turn has replaced the U.S. as the primary supplier of soybeans to China. 

Russia further joined China in supporting the enlargement of the BRICS following a similar increase in the SCO as it sought to build support and an informal axis of opportunists and other resentful partners in the rest of the world, particularly the Global South, now deemed the Global Majority. Reflecting its status as the foremost rival to the G-7, more than 40 states expressed interest in joining the BRICS. While Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates were four of the six invited countries to become members on 1 January 2024, Argentina opted out, and Riyadh is still considering Saudi Arabia's entry. In 2010, China facilitated South Africa's integration. 

The BRICS’ new joiners displace the artificial center of gravity away from democratic BRICS to autocratic regimes although both the UAE and Saudi Arabia are also close partners with the United States. Nonetheless the shift to the Middle East focus will likely increase polarization and sharpen some tensions within the group. Now it’s not just China and Russia that prefer a world that is “safe for autocracy”[34] as Iran has actively sided with Russia, and Egypt and the other Arab countries are inclined to play the major powers off each other. Brazil and India quietly opposed the BRICS expansion but lacked the leverage to block China’s agenda.

In the past, regime type was a less important factor as domestic political groupings in the BRICS countries generally opposed U.S. hypocrisy, double standards about sanctions and use of force, and rules they have had no say in making. South Africa as a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the sole democracy among the three BRICS democratic countries to face a legal obligation to detain Putin given the warrant for his arrest over war crimes in Ukraine. When Johannesburg hosted the annual BRICS leaders summit in August 2023 this calamity was averted by Putin’s decision to participate virtually.

Competition for influence in the Global South (previously called the Third World) is not presently taking the destructive form that it did in the Cold War, even within the new blocs. One recalls the Sino-Soviet rivalry where the two principal actors of the communist world engaged in dangerous out-bidding strategies for leadership that made them “worse than a monolith” facing the West.[35] Now their cooperation reflects a shared interest in containing the United States, its spread of democracy and alliances. U.S. hegemony poses a threat to their illiberal political systems, China’s aspirations to be the regional hegemon in Asia, as well as to Russia’s imperial aspirations in dominating the former Soviet space.

However, the current coalitions nonetheless have internal fissures that could cause ruptures in any of the bilateral relationships. In particular, China is uncomfortable with Russia’s close partnership with North Korea, fearing it lacks firm boundaries and may be used to escalate the war or as leverage against China. China also dislikes Moscow’s engagement with New Delhi and may force Russia to choose between partners in the future. Moreover, among both Russian and Chinese elites, there is a longer-term fear in both countries that the other will sell it out. 

Yet in wartime, Russia is more constrained than China. Thus, it is more motivated to appeal to the article of faith among BRICS comrades in multipolarity and as the legitimate successor to the nonaligned movement. Never mind that the world is not genuinely multipolar in its actual power configuration. Multipolarity is as much symbolic, even sometimes a meme to warn the West not to take developing countries and the rest of the world for granted. It’s also what each BRICS country and others in the Global South – or Global Majority – imagine it to be. 

Accordingly, Moscow seeks to elevate the BRICS role in the international arena to the “vanguard of the Global Majority,” according to an important 2024 study by a leading Russian think tank.[36] The rise of the rest is thus a strategic asset, and Russians are talking about the need to diversify ties with the world's majority countries now more than ever before. Moscow’s imperialist aggression has met largely regional pushback in Europe, but not global counter-balancing. This is the result of self-interested behavior by other powers like China and India, who were pleased to buy Russian exports of natural resource-based commodities at discounted prices. It also reflects the spread of counter-norms in the Global South, that have created a cross-current underappreciated in the West.