Russia believes there are ‘serious intentions’ behind Turkey’s plans to join the BRICS alliance of major emerging nations, after a Turkish government spokesman confirmed earlier this week that Turkey wants to join the bloc founded by China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa.
‘I assume that when a government says it is taking a specific step, it is backed by serious intentions,’ Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in remarks published Friday by Russia’s state news agency TASS. Lavrov pointed out that there are no rules in the BRICS that prohibit its members from having ties with other organisations, referring to Turkey’s NATO membership or its status as a candidate country for EU.
‘The main thing for full members and countries developing various forms of cooperation with the BRICS is to share common values that are different from those that the European Union has been advocating in Ukraine,’ the Russian foreign minister stressed. ‘All BRICS members are ready to comply with the provisions of the UN Charter fully and reciprocally. Not in an optional or random way. Because this is what constitutes multipolarity,’ Lavrov concluded.
Ömer Çelik, spokesman for the AKP party led by Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, confirmed earlier this week that ‘the process (to join the BRICS) is underway’; although the organisation has not yet commented on Turkey’s possible candidacy, Kremlin sources claim that Erdoğan will attend in person the BRICS summit to be held in late October in the Russian city of Kazan, where Turkey’s membership will be one of the items on the agenda. In late August Azerbaijan, a close ally of Ankara, announced that it had formally applied to join the emerging bloc.
The US remains silent
For now, the United States, Turkey’s main NATO partner, has chosen not to comment on the Eurasian country’s possible entry into the BRICS; the only official statements to date have come from US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who has limited himself to saying that Turkey will remain an important ally of Washington.
The former US ambassador to Ankara until August, Jeff Flake, had expressed last June confidence that Turkey would not join the BRICS, but added that this would not change the alliance between Ankara and the West: ‘I think they (in Ankara) realise that the Russian economy is becoming a war economy. It doesn’t have much future, especially with the sanctions that the West has imposed,’ he said during an interview with Reuters.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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