ABSTRACT

This chapter provides information on the 21st century Russian Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) diplomacy, highlighting Russian President Putin’s 2012 and 2013 agendas for Russia and for BRICS. It focuses on Russian proxy wars against the US in Russia’s post-Soviet neighborhood as well as on Russia’s uni-lateral intervention into the Syrian civil war and the concomitant “silence of the BRICS”, to quote Indian ex-Minister and pundit Jaswant Singh. The chapter traces an evolution from a bullish to a more bearish Russian approach to BRICS and continues by going into the broader world order context, highlighting the Russian grand strategy. The bilateral Russia-China relationship contains a power transition drama of its own. When presenting his plan for the Kremlin elites in 1996, Evgeny Primakov offered a three-way strategic pivot between Russia, India, and, China, which amounted to a doctrine of multipolarity.