BRICS has too many members with wildly divergent interests. India and China have fought several wars and there is, for all intents, a lukewarm war going on between them now. Iran and Saudi Arabia are completely incompatible and spend much of their intelligence budget fomenting trouble within the other’s borders. Russia, as one poster described her, is a termite eating away at the world’s structure. Russia wants to keep America busy in other parts of the world to dissipate whatever aide America might supply to Russia’s enemies. Several sources reported that Hamas’ leaders went to Moscow recently.
If Russia gave the go-ahead to Hamas or facilitated the recent attack against Israel, then Russia probably shot themselves in the foot. The reason Israel has steered well clear of the Ukraine conflict is to keep peace within the huge community of Russian ex-pats in Israel. This attack will change that. Also, Israel wanted to keep as many lines of communications open as Russia has not used the air defenses they man in Syria to target Israeli raids against Hamas...a Russian ally.
Pre-Putin, I think Russia repeatedly made the best call on most situations to support Russian interests. But lately I think that, probably because all calls are being made by one man who is living in an echo chamber, Russia has made bad call after bad call. I think the attack by Hamas, if Israel can implicate the Russians, will turn out to be the moment when Russia’s situation went from bad to worse.