The Duran Podcast - Putin, Xi, Modi at SCO. BRICS united

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Putin, Xi, Modi at SCO. BRICS united

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the SCO meeting, which is coming up in a couple of days now, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a meeting where Putin will be present in person. He's actually going to be making quite a big trip to China long, a long stay in China for four days. In China, he will be at the SCO, and then he's going to also attend the World War II event as well. Your thoughts on this? Yeah, it's a very big event. Putin obviously is going to be perhaps the most important single guest because obviously China's major friend is Russia. I mean, again, people want sometimes to downplay the importance of this.

But China and Russia now are working extremely closely together. and their trade and economic and their science and their defense cooperation is developing all of the time, and it will continue to do so. But, of course, it's not just Putin. Modi is also going. And over the last couple of days, we've had intense interactions between all of these three key states, China, India, Russia. Jay Shankar, the Indian foreign minister, has just been to Russia, where he's met Putin. Before Jai Shankar, the Modi's national security adviser, Ajid Dahl, was also in Moscow, and he also met Putin.

Putin has had two telephone conversations with Modi over the last week, I believe. So you can see there's an awful lot of interaction. He's also spoken to Lula. You could see that all of these leaders are now interacting and talking and discussing and preparing for this set of meetings. That is going to happen in China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Some of them, no doubt, will stay for the Victory Day celebrations. Putin, of course, will. And I'm going to make a quick statement.

I think that this is going to be the big important international meeting this year, just as Kazan was the big important international meeting last year. If you remember, there was a lot of comments when the Rio meeting, the Bricks meeting in Rio took place that many of the top leaders weren't going, that C and Putin didn't go. Lula and Maudi were there, of course, but Putin's seed didn't go

and many people said that this is the beginning at the end of the bricks and bricks, this importance is fading. I think what's now become clear is that perhaps by some kind of quiet agreement between all of them, it was agreed that the big meeting would be the one that's going to take place now in China.

And India and China are working together, as we've already discussed, to improve their relations. Wang Yi has been to India, he's met Modi, they've had discussions about the border, those have apparently gone quite well. So a lot is going to come out of these meetings and it will be mostly about Rick's integration. So not just China Russia, not just celebrating China's victory against Japan in World War II, important though that was, but also, as I said, working together to move Bricks forward. And I suspect there's a very, very, very detailed agenda. And you can get the sense through all of these meetings that they're already working on it.

Bricks integration in what respect? What are we looking at? Trade and payments systems. And that's That is what Bricks is about. Many people thought that with Rio, that was all going to end. We discussed that Rio, on the country, took this process forward. Rio is now looking like the preparatory meeting for this big meeting, which is going to happen now. And by the way, by agreement, the country that will then head Bricks next year will be India. So it's not about the replacing of the USDA?

No, no, no. I think they've all looked at that. Lula was keen on the idea at one time, but they've looked at it. I think they've decided that that is impractical, that the only currency that could fulfill that could fulfill that role is the R&B, China's currency. And because it's not fully convertible, it cannot be a reserve currency at the present time. Besides, it's often said that in order to have a reserve currency, you need to run trade deficits

and China doesn't want to run trade deficits at the moment any more than, say, Russia does. Right. So they're going to focus on building the infrastructure and the architecture so that they can trade outside of the collective West system. But they're not looking to replace the USD as the trading vehicle. Yeah, no. So it's going to be quite a complex system in some respects. But from what I learned about it, it resembles the original Bretton Woods plan that John Maynard Keynes put together at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.

So there'll be no single reserve currency. there will be units of account, there will be transfer systems, which will be using, which will to some extent at least use blockchain technologies, by the way, something which is quite interesting, and I wonder how that's going to work. And I've heard that there are problems with blockchain in the sense that it can be quite slow, but anyway, you undoubtedly do know a lot more about this than I do. But apparently this has all been worked out and the programmes have been created are being created by Russian and Chinese and Indian teams, but mainly Chinese and Russian. And there will also have to be central clearing houses.

There will have to be at least some kind of a bank that will coordinate a lot of the transfers and which will operate the account, the units of account, and there will have to be a depository. and depositories similar to Euroclear, for example. And apparently they're also being created. So it's quite an elaborate financial architecture. What about Putin and Xi? Yeah. What do you think those two leaders are going to focus on?

Obviously, Project Ukraine is going to be something that they're going to talk about, right? Or not? Or they're not going to get too deep into. into Project Ukraine. They're going to discuss Trump, the U.S. tariffs. What exactly are they going to be focused on? They will undoubtedly be talking about Project Ukraine and Putin will want to brief see personally about his meetings, his meeting with Trump in Alaska. It's interesting that after the Alaska meeting, Putin held a whole series of telephone conversations with various world leaders, including Modi and Lula, to brief them about his meeting with Alaska.

But the Kremlin has not provided any report of a telephone call with C. So he's clearly saving it for the one-to-one meeting he's going to have with C. So he's going to brief C about the meeting. He's going to make quite sure that the Chinese are entirely reassured that whatever it was that the Americans and the Russians discussed in Alaska, it does not mean that Russia is reconsidering its relationship with China or its special, you know, its partnership with China, its strategic partnership with China. So, I mean, the Russians will be providing very, very detailed explanations and discussions about what happened there. Bear in mind, I'm sure Lavrov will be

and other people who were there in Alaska will be there too. So the Russians will brief the Chinese very fully about that. They will also discuss strategic geopolitical issues. There's been increasing amounts of military cooperation between China and Russia. They will talk about the Middle East. They will talk about the situation with Iran. They will, of course, and indeed, discuss the situation in Ukraine. The Chinese are probably very well informed about Ukraine. It's known that they have representatives permanently stationed at the Russian general staff, just as the Russians have military officers at the Chinese general staff. But C and the Chinese will want to hear in more detail what the Russians are doing and how the Russians see the war

going and what the Russian plans are. And there will be talking about naval cooperation. The Russians are now also, they've also signed off on a major naval construction program. This is an important topic because China is also obviously developing its navy, which is of course orders of magnitude bigger than Russia's. But they will want to know what the Russians are up to there. They will want to discuss oil and energy flows. There's been talk about the Europeans trying to interfere with Russian merchant shipping, or at least merchant shipping that's traveling from Russia, including oil tankers. And the Chinese will want to know all about that and what the Russians are thinking about doing about all of that and whether they might need any assistance. And they will talk

about other things like the Northern Sea route, about Chinese investment in Russia's oil and gas sector, about power of Siberia 2, which apparently most of the work now has been done to sort it out. And they will be discussing industry cooperation and technology cooperation. China is now busy trying to develop its chips, its chips industry. Russia also has programmed to develop its own chips industry. They will want to see whether there's any point or purpose in cooperating on this. China is far ahead in developing chips, but Russia has a longer history of building chips, going way back to the Soviet era.

And the Soviets, for example, were very, very advanced. in lithography. And then the Russians are now starting to build lithography machines again. So maybe that there is something that can be done there. And they'll be discussing other joint projects, machine building, gas turbines, all of those things. It will be a very, very heavy, busy period. The next four days of Putin is going to be there. And of course, C is going to have to meet all the other leaders who are also there.

apparently 20 leaders are coming to China for the meetings. So C and Putin are going to be very busy, but C is going to be very busy especially. What is Trump saying about all of this? What do you think he's saying? What was the Trump White House thinking about all of this? Or should they be concerned about this? I think it depends very much how they play this. First of all, they need to understand that this is real, that this isn't just.

people meeting and talking and all talk and no action. Quite the opposite. They ought to be concerned because clearly a major economic bloc is developing and a trading system is developing which is different from the one that has existed before and the one that existed before is the one of course that the United States dominated and still dominates. So they ought to be nervous about this and it ought to affect and influence their policies. I remain of the view, and I know that hardly anybody in the US agrees with me, but I remain of the view that if the United States were wise, it would see this as an opportunity in the sense that the existing trade system, that the United States has dominated

since the Second World War, has exhausted itself. The United States still has an economy that is huge, diversified, has a lot of technology and retains energy. What the United States needs to do is to break out of the old trading system, which is now way down by moribund economies, like the ones in Europe. And here we have one that has been created. that it might want to enter into a partnership with. If the Americans were wise, they would be sending their own people to this meeting and they would be speaking to the people there

and they would be looking to see how they could become involved. And the extraordinary thing is, I think far from sending them away, the Russians certainly, perhaps even the Chinese would welcome. Yeah. Forget about the EU. It's where it's at. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. All right. We will end the video there. The durand.locos.com. We are on Rumble and X and telegram and go to Durant shop. Pick up some merch like what we are wearing in this video update.

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