António Guterres, UN secretary-general and a former Socialist prime minister of Portugal, is under fire on numerous levels today as he takes part in what one media outlet has described as “Putin’s grotesque (BRICS) summit” in Russia.
Not only has the Portuguese socialist accepted Mr Putin’s invitation to the summit – having declined Ukraine’s invite to the first global peace summit earlier this year in Switzerland – he did so when his own office was loathe to admit it, reports the Telegraph.
The number of negative comment pieces already online are impressive, with many comments referring to the ‘pointlessness of the United Nations’.
Only last week, Portuguese politicians made a show of ‘calling on Israel to rescind their labelling of Mr Guterres as persona non grata’. Now, there is not a peep from any of them.
And tomorrow, we’re told, António Guterres will have a face-to-face meeting with Mr Putin, on the sidelines of the summit which is testament to the fact that all the Western attempts to vilify the Russian dictator have failed.
Not only is Russia’s economy ‘booming’ in comparison to that of the West, the summit has brought together 36 world leaders representing around half the world’s population and around 30% of its economy.
Among the many countries represented are some that signed up to the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court which has issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest, alleging war crimes. There is even a NATO member taking part (Turkey).
This is almost certainly why António Guterres decided to attend. Indeed, a statement by the UN today defended his actions saying that BRICS now represents “half the world’s population”, and that attending large international meetings is “standard practice”.
Observers suggest “one saving grace is that the BRICS contain some odd bedfellows, never likely to agree on anything, notably China and India. Egypt and Ethiopia are unlikely to see eye to eye either, nor Saudi Arabia and Iran. Unlike the G7 of industrialised nations, enmities ancient and modern will probably scupper Putin’s aggrandising ambitions” – but even that could be simplistic.
News today from Kazan, where the meeting is taking place, suggests “Vladimir Putin has proclaimed the start of a new “world order”. He will more than double the size of the BRICS bloc by the time he leaves Kazan tomorrow evening, “creating an economic bloc to challenge the West”, writes James Kilner for the Telegraph.
Hanna Notte, a senior associate at the Center of Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the Kremlin is using the leaders who had travelled to Russia to score diplomatic points.
“This will reinforce the impression that Russia’s war against Ukraine has become the ‘new normal’ and that Putin is not considered a pariah outside Western capitals,” she told Kilner.
Attending leaders have been impressing on Mr Putin the need to negotiate peace, but while he has been reported to have “welcomed offers by several of the BRICS leaders to mediate in Ukraine”, he told them his forces were advancing, writes France 24.
All this, when the world is a whisper away from presidential elections in America that could also ‘change everything’.
