MOSCOW: The BRICS group will generate most of the global economic growth in the coming years thanks to its size and relatively fast growth compared with that of developed Western nations, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday. Putin hopes to build up BRICS - which has expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates as well as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - as a powerful counterweight to the West in global politics and trade.

The Kremlin leader is due to host a BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan on Oct 22-24. “The countries in our association are essentially the drivers of global economic growth. In the foreseeable future, BRICS will generate the main increase in global GDP,” Putin told officials and businessmen at BRICS business forum in Moscow. “The economic growth of BRICS members will increasingly depend less on external influence or interference. This is essentially economic sovereignty,” Putin added.

Next week’s summit is being presented by Moscow as evidence that Western efforts to isolate Russia over its actions in Ukraine have failed. Russia wants other countries to work with it to overhaul the global financial system and end the dominance of the US dollar. China, India and the UAE confirmed on Friday that their leaders would attend the summit in Kazan.

Putin said 30 countries around the world had expressed interest in cooperation with the BRICS grouping and that next week’s summit would consider possible options for the group’s further enlargement. “The doors are open, we are not barring anyone,” Putin told reporters from BRICS countries . Putin cited some of the initiatives that Russia has previously outlined ahead of the summit, including a joint cross-border payments system and a reinsurance company.

Putin said that group members were working on a SWIFT-like financial messaging system immune to Western sanctions and the use of national digital currencies in financing investment projects with high growth potential inside and outside BRICS.

He stressed that Russia’s financial initiatives for the summit implied the extensive use of national currencies, while talk of creating a single currency for the BRICS grouping was “premature”. He called on the New Development Bank, the BRICS’ only functioning multilateral development institution, to invest in technology and infrastructure across the countries of the Global South. “As a development institution, the bank already serves as an alternative to many Western financial mechanisms, and we will naturally continue to develop it,” Putin said. He called for more investment in e-commerce and artificial intelligence.

Putin sought to promote Russia’s new transport megaprojects such as the Arctic Sea Route and the North-to-South corridor, linking Russia to the Gulf and Indian Ocean through the Caspian Sea and Iran.

“It is the key to increasing freight transportation between the Eurasian and African continents,” he said. — Reuters