Inside the big summit where Putin hopes to defy western pressure on Ukraine war

KAZAN, Russia — Almost 700 miles east of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the city of Kazan is a safe enough distance for President Vladimir Putin to try and reposition himself as an international ambassador.

In the center opposite Kazan’s Kremlin, a historic castle, Russian state media is erecting broadcast stages to amplify three days of meetings, as world leaders from a group known as BRICS convene in the city for its annual summit.

Representing 41.1% of the world’s population and 37.3% of its gross domestic product, the bloc aims to counterbalance United States-led Western alliances; the three-day event will allow Putin to stand shoulder to shoulder with Russia’s global allies and defy predictions that the war in Ukraine and an international arrest warrant would turn him into a pariah.

The Kremlin has called it one of the “largest-scale foreign policy events ever” in Russia.

Among those recruited to staff the gathering in the city east of Moscow is 18-year-old student Islam Gavrilov, who said his father, Sergei Gavrilov, 46, “died in the trenches” in Ukraine on Oct. 1, 2022.

“He got a piece of shrapnel from a grenade in his hip and he bled to death because the hospital was very far away,” he told NBC News on Monday.

With a warm smile, Gavrilov said he was surprised that American media was attending the BRICS conference. Wearing NASA sweatpants with an American flag on it, he displayed his phone screen saver bearing a Harvard University motif.

It’s his “dream” to study in America, he said, adding that his mother didn’t want him to go because she thought the U.S. was a “bad place.”

Despite his personal loss, he said that Putin was “more or less right” when he took the decision to invade Ukraine more than 2 ½ years ago in February 2022. Still a staunch supporter of his leader, he said he was a member of The Movement of the First, a pro-Putin youth group.

The countries gathering for the BRICS summit, where Gavrilov is helping to chaperone delegates, share a similar mix of apparently contradictory views.

The group’s acronym comes from its first five members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — but Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates were allowed to join earlier this year.

Together, they represent more of the world’s population and GDP than the European Union or the G7, the organization formed by seven of the world’s largest industrialized nations, according to the European Parliament.

Russia holds the rotating presidency and will be hoping this year’s summit will allow the country to negotiate deals with major players such as India and China to help shore up its economy and war effort by expanding trade and bypassing Western sanctions.

For the other participants, it’s a chance to amplify their voices, although it is a growing mix of nations with deep ideological divisions and alliances who rarely see eye to eye, and some have criticized Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Careful choreography will aim to conceal some of those rifts.

Russia and Iranian protocol teams huddled together in a Kazan hotel Sunday planning the arrival of Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian.

On the same day Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the UAE and a close U.S. partner, met with President Putin at his residence in a Moscow suburb for talks that went on until midnight. 

In a statement to NBC News Monday Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, said his country was “committed to fostering dialogue and international cooperation through multilateral platforms, including the BRICS.”

On Monday night, the Kremlin announced a schedule that might allow the UAE’s leader to leave Russia before the Iranian president’s meeting with Putin on Wednesday.

Leaders from 15 other nonmember states are also set to attend the three-day summit in Kazan, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a U.S. ally who applied to join the bloc in September.

However, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Prince Mohammed bin Salman has decided not to attend in person and has sent his foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, instead. Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, cancelled his trip after a fall at home caused a minor brain hemorrhage.

A number of other nations have expressed a desire to be members of the bloc which, since its inception in 2006, has fashioned itself into an alternative to the U.S.-dominated G7 and other Western-led international groupings, and become a major platform for developing nations in the Global South that have long complained they’ve been left behind.

“BRICS is organizationally incoherent,” David Lubin, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a London based think tank, told NBC News in a telephone interview Monday. “If you put India and China at the same table, you’re not going to get much agreement about anything.”

However, he said, developing countries are “fed up” with American financial hegemony and want to provide alternatives to the dollar when it comes to international finance.

Inside Kazan, security is tight, the streets packed with police and armed law enforcement personnel. Russian security forces will undoubtedly be aware that drone attacks in April hit the town of Yelabuga and an oil refinery in Nizhnekamsk, both of which are further east than the city. Ukraine claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Army recruitment signs are tied to pedestrian railings. 

While Ukraine is a “long, long way away, the modern ballistic missile can very easily come here,” Gavrilov said.

“I hope that there will be some kind of peace negotiation because there will be exhaustion on one side or the other,” he added about the war which took his father’s life.

“Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and I wonder what was the purpose of it. For me personally, I don’t need this kind of victory,” Gavrilov added.

Keir Simmons and Natasha Lebedeva reported from Kazan. Freddie Clayton reported from London.