BRICS temporarily suspends admission of new members

“By an overwhelming majority, the ten nations decided to take a ‘pause’ in admitting new members in order to ‘accept’ the new members who have doubled the size of the association,” he said at a meeting with the speaker of the Council of the Republic, the upper house of the parliament of Belarus, Natalia Kochanova.

“At the same time, we are working on categories of partner countries as stages on the way to full membership. We will support our Belarusian friends as well as a number of other like-minded nations,” said Lavrov, who is in Minsk on an official visit.

On June 10-11, a meeting of BRICS foreign ministers was held in Nizhny Novgorod. This was the first ministerial meeting after the BRICS expansion in 2023, when Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates became full BRICS members, along with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. About 30 more countries are interested in cooperation with the association in one format or another.

On January 1, 2024, Russia took over the presidency of the BRICS for one year. The Russian presidency includes more than 250 different events, the central of which is the BRICS summit in Kazan in October 2024.

MPs/PR