The Duran Podcast - Putin discusses BRICS, payment system, sanctions & Ukraine

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Putin discusses BRICS, payment system, sanctions & Ukraine

All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is happening in Kazan, Bricks Kazan. And Putin had, he attended many events, gave speeches, talked to the media, talked about the special military operation, talked about the statements that Zelensky made about NATO and nuclear weapons, talked a lot about bricks and a lot about the future of bricks, the countries that want to enter bricks, as well as the payment system, the financial architecture that many people believe is going to be announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan. So where would you like to begin as far as talking about everything that Putin talked about at these events before the BRICS summit takes place?

By the way, just on a side note, I believe Modi has confirmed. that he will attend but Lula his office has stated that Lula will not be able to attend in person he'll attend via video because he suffered

a head injury last weekend he can't want to understand his doctor said he can't travel that's what they're saying with regards to Lula so anyway I just wanted to throw that out there

where should we begin with all the events around Bricks Kazan I mean the first thing to say was that it's I was watching Putin in action he was in all sorts of talking, as you said, in all kinds of venues. He looked, again, supremely confident and on top of things.

And obviously the Russians as chair, because they've been the Bricks chair this year, have been working very hard in putting it all together. And I think he feels that everything is coming together in terms of the Bricks quite well. He had an awful lot to say about the bricks. He had an awful lot to say about the bricks, his place in the world. He went out of his way to say that bricks is not a product of the Ukraine war, as some people have said. He said that the way things have developed with the bricks, this coming together is an organic event. It was inevitable.

It is the product of economic and economic. global forces that would have resulted in something like the Bricks emerging anyway, even if there had not been a Ukraine war. So what he's basically trying to say is that this is permanent. This is something that would have happened. It is not the result of transitory events. This is part, if you like, at the March of History. And we are there and we're going to have this organisation,

which is going to bring together all of these diverse economies. and it is going to be a permanent thing. And it already accounts for a bigger part of world trade and the world economy than the G7 states do. So that was one thing that he said. The second is that he had this meeting with media outlets from the BRIC states, including one from Saudi Arabia, and over the course of it, they confirmed, the Saudi representative confirmed that MBS himself is not going to attend the BRIC summit. The reason he's giving

is that the situation in the Middle East makes that impossible. But Saudi Arabia will attend, will participate, be represented by its foreign minister. So there's been some question about whether Saudi Arabia is a brick state and whether it considers itself a brick state, I think we can answer that in the qualified affirmative. They are attending, they are participating in the meetings, and the Saudis were participating in this press conference as well. The third thing is that Putin gave us a lot more information

about the financial and messaging systems, which are being created. And this is very, very much in line with what we had discussed previously in other programmes. First of all, they're not going to set up a single currency. I mean, this is not, you know, this is not part of the agenda. They are going to go ahead and create a messaging system, an international messaging system.

Many of these countries, China, Russia, India, apparently, have their own internal messaging system. But there is no international messaging system yet. They're now working on setting one up. In other words, a direct rival to Swift. But in terms of trading, the transfers of funds are going to be done by the central banks using digital currencies. This is what it's all working towards.

They're going to use digital currencies and the central banks will be the key institutions. So what will happen is that if you are a company in India and you want to trade with Russia, you have an account with your central bank, the central bank, you provide, you pay the central bank, the central bank then transfers digitally money to Russia in return for whatever it is that you're selling to the Russians and that is how that is basically how it's all going to work so the central banks the BRIC central banks are going to play an absolutely key role in the whole system and at the core of the system there is going to be the new BRICS bank the new economic bank which has already been set up,

it's been in existence for some time, it's going to be, from what I can tell, significantly enlarged and it may play a role also in transferring these funds and also in acting to help any particular country sort out its liquidity problems.

So he's given us a sketchy but nonetheless very interesting idea of what the new financial and messaging systems are going to be. And clearly that is the priority. For the moment, they're not going to expand Briggs further at this summit. There's 10 BRICS member states. They don't want more at the moment because they need to get all of these systems up and running first. But he did speak about the fact that there are now dozens of countries applying to join Briggs. and BRICS expansion is absolutely on the agenda, only not just yet.

Yeah, I imagine that the central bank will be working with the local banks in each of the BRICS countries. And over time, the local banks will also integrate into this system as well. That is exactly right. That's exactly correct. Okay. Okay. A quick question before I get to another question. Do you think that if Swift did not go along with these sanctions, that it would have been Swift,

that would have been the messaging system in Bricks, that they would have just defaulted and said, let's just use Swift? Absolutely. I do think the question of setting up an alternative to Swift would have arisen, because Swift was working perfectly well. There was no reason about this. Putin spoke about this. He spoke about the dollar specifically. He said, we never intended.

We never set out to replace the dollar as our, you know, our means of financial exchange. We weren't any of us looking to opt out of the dollar. It said the Americans started to use the dollar against us. The same about sanctions. He had an awful lot to say about sanctions. He said that the sanctions have pushed all of these various countries, Russia, India now, because of course India is facing pressure. I mean, Justin Trudeau has started a whole campaign against India at the moment.

All of these countries facing this relentless pressure. And it's obliged them to start creating all of these systems and to do so at speed. And absolutely, they would have stopped with Swift. Why not? Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Talk about what Putin said with regards to Zelensky's statements in Brussels last week, the nukes, nukes or NATO, pretty much. That was Olensky's demand. And then also talk about what he said with questions regarding the conflict in Ukraine, the special military

operation, when he believes that the conflict is going to end. And he got a lot of questions on the SMO as well. So just talk about, yes, you did comments on these two issues. Yes, and it was very interesting because of course what he said about the nuclear things were exactly what we predicted he would say. First of all, he said that this isn't the first time that the Ukrainians have floated the ideas of having nuclear weapons. They were doing that before the SMO began. The SMO began was launched in part because the Ukrainians were talking about nuclear weapons. weapons. He actually said that. Now, you can find that in his press conference. It's exactly what we said he would do, and lo and behold, he's doing it. So when he meets Modi and Xi Jinping, when he speaks

virtually to Lula and all of these others, he'll have it all out, cut and dry, he sit out there, and he say, look, the Ukrainians are on a quest to acquire nuclear weapons. They were before, and they are still. And that is proof that we were right to start the SMO because these people are a standing threat to us on our Western border. So that was the first thing. That was one thing he said. The other thing he said was that Zelensky's words were a provocation.

Russia would never allow Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. Russia can keep a track on what, the Ukrainians are doing in acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. And if the Ukrainians tried to get nuclear weapons from third parties, the Russians would see that as well. He said, you can't conceal that. It's like trying to hide a cat in a bag. You can't do it. So he took a very, an entirely predictable, put very, very hard line on this issue. Now, on all of the other, all of the other things. He again discussed potential negotiations with the Ukrainians. He said that Istanbul must be the starting point. But now the question of the four regions is no longer up to

for discussion. These are Russian territory and there is no debate any longer about them. So it will negotiations, if they were to take place now, would be exclusively about issues like demilitarization, denuclearization, denatification, Ukraine's neutral status, the position of Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, the status of the Orthodox Church, things of that kind. In other words, the only topic that would be discussed, the only topics that would be discussed now, would be about Ukraine's internal structures. So that is a major departure,

because up to now and when they previously met in Istanbul, the Russians did understand that the status of the four regions was in conflict. Now they no longer say that any longer. They say that conflict no longer exists. It's over. A decision has been made. This thing is done.

So an extremely hard line, but he also made, I think, fairly clear that he doesn't expect the Ukrainians, certainly not with Zelensky in charge to undertake any negotiations. And that besides, it's absurd to think that the Ukrainians are going to negotiate when they still have a decree in place which forbids them doing so. So he took a very, very hard line about the progress

of the special military operation. The progress of the operation itself, he seemed very, very confident. And he also spoke about how it was a war of mathematicians, rather curious expression, that what happens is that each side is constantly upgrading its software in order to counter the weapons of the other side. The Ukrainians absolutely lack the resources to do that. So this is all really being done by the West, but the Russians are nonetheless ahead. And I mean, he seemed very, very confident about the military situation overall. he's got every reason to be.

Yeah, agreed. He was asked, I believe, by a journalist about a timeline as to when the war would end. And I think he didn't. He didn't give a timeline. He actually said that would be a foolish thing to do. Which I think that is absolutely sensible. I mean, he said, you know, we can't set dates

on things like that. And he's obviously right. Yeah, a final question. Do you think that when the summit wraps up in Kazan that Putin is going to place more focus on resolving Ukraine? I mean, I'm not saying he's not focused on it. I'm just saying that it does look like he has been concentrating a lot on Kazan and the summit. Do you think it's going to be kind of a relief for Putin's? to say, okay, we got this big event out of the way. It was successful. Now let's wrap this

this SMO up. I think you made it actually an extremely important point, which I think a lot of people don't understand. If you went through Putin's diary and looked at what Putin has been doing over the last year, I am going to make a shrewd guess that he has spent a lot more time preparing for Kazan than he has in monitoring the events of the special military operation. He's left the work on the special

military operation to the military, to Shoygu and Belahusuf and to people like that. And he's focused, most of his work in the foreign policy field has been on preparing for Kazan. He is very, very invested in this project.

He's been spending a huge, huge amount of time talking to all the various leaders, monitoring the work of the various working groups. This has been, without any question, his priority. He wants and needs a successful summit in Kazan and the tone of his pre-conference statements at his press conference shows that he thinks he's going to get it. Now, Kazan will be out of the way. Obviously, there'll still need to be an awful lot of work done. I believe it's the South Africans who now take over, but the Russians will still want to keep track on what is happening.

So he's not going to simply stop thinking about the bricks. And, of course, he's also got crises in all sorts of other places. He's got a crisis in the Middle East, which concerns him too, just as it concerns everybody, and all those things. But I agree. I think from now on two things will be he's probably. priority, obviously always the internal domestic economic social situation. That is always the single biggest item on Putin's agenda. But from now on, I think he will start to focus more, as you

correctly say, on the special military operation. And though he is not giving a time, a date or a timetable for it, I think he definitely wants it over this coming year in 2025. No. Not good news if you're the collective West, to be quite honest. No, no. All right. We will end the video there. The durand. DotLocals.com. We are on Odyssey, bitch, shoot, rumble, telegram, rock, vid, and we are also on X. And go to the Duran shop, pick up some merch like the shirts we are wearing in this video. Use the code October 20. That is October 20 and get 20% off all items in our store. The link is in the description box.

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