However, Indonesia should not take BRICS’s official pronouncements at face value. It must read between the lines: Russia is using BRICS to show that it still has supporters from the Global South against the Global North who are supporting Ukraine, thus portraying it as a civilizational struggle.

Additionally, most of Indonesia’s economic outreach with BRICS countries has happened outside the BRICS framework, thus rendering its outreach through BRICS unnecessary.

The BRICS aim is to counterbalance Western economic influence and promote a fairer global governance structure for developing countries or the “Global South”. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the 2024 BRICS Summit plenary session emphasized this point.

He criticized the "rule-based order imposed by the West" as a means to restrict development in the Global South. He highlighted the perceived hypocrisy in the West’s approach to global politics, asserting that the world should instead follow “universal principles” that respect the sovereign choices of all nations and uphold international law, a stance aimed at challenging Western dominance.

However, this narrative clashed with his defense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which he portrayed as necessary to counter Kyiv’s “critical threat to Russia’s security and the rights of Russian-speaking people” in Ukraine.

This justification contradicts the Global South’s core principles such as respect for national sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence, as underscored in the 1955 Bandung Declaration.