As Russian President Vladimir Putin hosts the first summit of BRICS+ in Tatarstan’s capital Kazan on Oct. 22–24, it has motivated me to update my comparison of this group of countries with the G-7 in terms of components of national power as of early 2024. This comparison has reaffirmed my earlier findings that BRICS has overtaken the G-7—which some in the former want to position as a rival to the latter—in key components such as economy and demography. But can BRICS put that advantage to use?

Single-Variable Measurements Show BRICS Overtaking G-7...

I began the renewed comparison of BRICS and the G-7 with conducting three waves of measurements focused on their economic and demographic performance: 

1. In 2001, when Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neil proposed grouping what he saw as the world’s key emerging economies; 
2. In 2024, the current year; and 
3. In 2029, which is the furthest year for which the April 2024 edition of IMF’s World Economic Outlook offers forecasts for most of the world’s countries.¹

My measurements of economic performance indicate that the BRICS’s share in world GDP has already overtaken that of the G-7 (see Figure 1 and Table 1), if calculated in terms of purchasing power parity (which is how the IMF measures these shares at country-level). The BRICS have also significantly outperformed the G-7 in terms of population, largely thanks to including the two most populous countries in the world: China and India. In fact, the combined population of the BRICS+ will exceed that of G-7 by a factor of four this year, according to U.N. data. However, U.N. data also suggests that the BRICS+ share of the world population is set to decline over the next five years. Also, when exploring how the BRICS have outperformed the G-7 economically and demographically, one should factor in that some (but not all) of that growth came from the addition of new members to the original group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India and China. (These non-original members include South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.²) 

A majority of Russians would support ending hostilities and launching peace negotiations, according to the results of a September 2024 poll by Russia's Levada Center on Russians' views on the war against Ukraine. However, when asked if Russia should make concessions in such negotiations, a vast majority answered in the negative. Moreover, when asked to evaluate the conditions of a hypothetical peace deal, vast majorities of respondents rejected returning territories to Kyiv, as well as Ukraine’s membership in NATO. In addition, when Levada divided its respondents into two groups, a majority in one of the groups said they would not support an end to the military conflict if it meant returning annexed territories, even if Vladimir Putin himself made such a decision. This obviously doesn’t bode well for those in the Westseeking support for brokering a peace deal that would defer territorial issues in exchange for Kyiv’s membership in the Alliance.

Not a week seems to go by without Russian officials issuing some kind of nuclear warning. During a meeting with the Russian Security Council on Sept. 25, President Vladimir Putin described “clarifications” proposed to the “Fundamentals of State Policy in the Sphere of Nuclear Deterrence,” a document he said officially defines and details Russia's nuclear strategy, including establishing the basic principle of using nuclear weapons.

In his remarks, Putin mentioned three apparently “new” conditions where Russia could consider the use of nuclear weapons:

1. Aggression by a non-nuclear state against Russia “with the participation or support” of a nuclear-armed state would be considered an attack by both.
2. A “massive launch of air and space attack weapons” crossing the Russian border involving “strategic and tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, drones, hypersonic and other aircraft.”
3. An attack on Russia and Belarus, including with conventional weapons, “if the enemy… creates a critical threat to our sovereignty.”

To hear Vladimir Putin say it the other day, NATO countries assisting Ukraine in collecting and using information for its strikes against targets inside Russia would cross one of his red lines, prompting him to escalate. Speaking on Russian TV Sept. 12, Putin identified two reasons why NATO countries giving Ukraine permission to use their long-range missiles for such strikes would mean that these countries “are at war with Russia.” The first reason is that for Ukraine to use such missiles, these NATO countries will have to provide Kyiv with satellite intelligence on targets in Russia. The second reason is that some of these countries’ specialists would have to enter data into the Western-supplied missiles’ targeting systems because it is something Ukrainians cannot do themselves, according to Putin. “We will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us,” the Russian leader warned.¹

Putin’s reasoning is problematic, however. First, Ukraine has been using U.K.-made Storm Shadow missiles, which Ukraine wants the Biden administration to approve for its use against targets inside Russia along with their French-made analogue Scalp, for strikes inside parts of Ukraine that are controlled by the Russian armed forces and which Putin describes as Russia’s own (e.g. Crimea), at least since 2023.² Thus, if Ukrainian personnel are, indeed, unable to enter targeting data into these missiles, then Western specialists have been doing it for them since at least 2023. Second, Ukraine has reportedly been using intelligence data collected by satellites operated by entities located in NATO countries, including the U.S., since the first half of 2022.

Recent news reports claim that Saudi Arabia persuaded Russia not to arm the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen with cruise missiles. If so, this “Saudi channel” may be an important means for restraining Russian behavior in the Middle East which Washington might be able to make use of on other occasions. But did Riyadh really succeed at this? Because if it did not, then hopes that may have developed in Washington about how Riyadh can moderate Moscow’s behavior on issues of vital interest to the U.S. and its allies may prove illusory.

Some of the reporting in the American media on the question of Saudi influence on Russia’s decision-making has relied heavily on unnamed U.S. government sources. And these sources gave differing accounts, thus leading to uncertainty as to whether it was primarily Saudi influence that dissuaded the Russians, or something else.

This can be seen by examining three recent news stories in the Western media about Saudi Arabia, Russia and the Houthis which the authors interviewed U.S. government officials for. (I rely on these three articles because my monitoring of Western media has led me to conclude that they have become the preferred sources for other articles written in the mainstream Western media on this question of Saudi influence.)

This analysis was originally posted on Mick Ryan's Substack and is reprinted here with the author's permission.

In a 1973 lecture, Sir Michael Howard described the impact of surprise, and the necessity of military institutions to prepare their people to absorb, and adapt around, surprises on the battlefield and beyond. He described how “this is an aspect of military science which needs to be studied above all others in the Armed Forces: the capacity to adapt oneself to the utterly unpredictable, the entirely unknown.”

Sir Lawrence Freedman, has written that, “a surprise attack, conceived with cunning, prepared with duplicity and executed with ruthlessness, provides international history with its most melodramatic moments.” Surprise is an important continuity in human competition and warfare. The desire to surprise an adversary is central to the Eastern and Western traditions of war.  

The aim is to shock an adversary and overwhelm them when they are their weakest or when they least expect it. That shock, and the break down in enemy cohesion and ability to effectively respond, can then be used to seize large amounts of ground and destroy significant enemy formations.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of his country in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded with Western countries to leave Russia. Hundreds of U.S. and EU-based companies heeded his call to “make sure that the Russians do not receive a single penny,” with Western politicians reportedly predicting that the exodus “would help strangle the Russian economy and undermine the Kremlin’s war effort,” while Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his four co-authors declared that “business retreats and sanctions are catastrophically crippling the Russian economy.” Predictions of Russia’s economic meltdown continued into 2023, with the New Republic diagnosing Russia as “going broke fast” and Business Insider editors describing Russia’s economy as “spiraling.” The future has looked dim even to some of the lead players in the Russian economy. One of Putin’s own oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska, predicted in March 2023 that Russia may run out of money in 2024 and would need foreign investment to prevent that. 

Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and support his VP Kamala Harris has Russian officials and scholars of U.S.-Russian relations divided on whether a Democrat can defeat the GOP’s Donald Trump in November. Boris Mezhuev, a Moscow-based political scientist, told pro-Kremlin conservative analytical portal Vzglyad in reference to Harris: “I think her prospects can be described as positive. The gap in ratings with Donald Trump is only a few percent.” According to Russian foreign policy veteran Sen. Alexey Pushkov, however, “in the battle for the presidency, Trump defeated Biden ahead of schedule.” Pushkov’s colleague, and deputy chairman of the Russian Senate Konstantin Kosachev, also believes Trump is more likely to win. Interestingly, Vladimir Pastukhov, a self-exiled opposition-minded Russian political scientist, concurs, predicting that Harris’s chances to defeat Trump are dim, while U.S.-based opposition-minded Russian scholar Konstantin Sonin is less pessimistic, putting her chances of Harris winning at 50/50.

The Levada Center has released the results of its monthly polling of Russians on Russia’s war in Ukraine and its broader stand-off with NATO. Some results, such as a record level of support for peace talks, may seem to be encouraging to doves, but the devil is in the details. More worrisome, the share of Russians who believe that an armed conflict between Russia and NATO could erupt has increased, as did the share of Russians who believe the use of nuclear weapons by their country in the context of “the current conflict in Ukraine” would be justified. In fact, every third Russian now shares this alarming belief, according to the poll’s findings, which I present and discuss in the order they have appeared in Levada’s latest poll on the conflict with Ukraine.

The shooting of Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania—which the ex-president survived and which the FBI is investigating as an assassination attempt—has elicited a roar of comments by Russian politicians, experts and journalists, both pro-Putin and anti-Putin. A number of commentators from both camps agreed that the incident boosts Trump’s electoral chances. As Russian self-exiled liberal expert Boris Pastukhov put it: “It was Trump that was being shot at, but it was Biden who got hit.” Experts on both sides of Russia’s political divide  noted that the attempt will contribute to the polarization of America, with one liberal Russian expert noting that the Kremlin will benefit from this trend. Commenting on Trump’s survival, some pro-Kremlin writers wondered if the heavens intervened to save him. Meanwhile, at least two of Russia’s major online retailers tried to profit from the incident.