The Russian leader hopes to use the meeting of the so-called BRICS group, which includes China and India, as a counterweight to the West.

Leaders of the Global South will flock to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, on October 22 for this year’s BRICS summit hosted by Russia, where they hope to thrash out some more details of the new non-aligned global order that its de facto leaders, President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping, are hoping to establish in order to challenge what they call the “unipolar” order, the US hegemony.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will be shaking hands this week with multiple world leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian.

The group’s appeal is only growing since its recent expansion, but it must now deal with a world on the brink.

After WWII, two major groups of nations with different systems emerged: socialist, led by the USSR, and capitalist, led by the United States. Later, in 1961, a third group entered the field. It was called “non-aligned” and initially led by Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, and Indonesia, but later, it grew into an impressive movement of about 120 states representing different continents. However, this configuration ended with the 1991 collapse of the USSR and a slow-motion decrease in activities of the non-aligned movement. Their last Congress took place 12 years ago, and since then, no new date has been announced.