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African leaders are leaving two days of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin with little to show in response to their requests to resume a deal that kept grain flowing from Ukraine and to find a way to end the war there. During a press conference Saturday, Putin said terminating the grain deal this month caused a rise in grain prices that benefits Russian companies, and Moscow would share some of those revenues with the “poorest nations.” Putin also said Russia would analyze the African leaders’ peace proposal for Ukraine.

The ANC has remained silent about the International Criminal Court’s issuing an arrest warrant for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, but the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) said the Russian leader was “welcome” in South Africa. South Africa faces a diplomatic problem because Putin is among the international dignitaries expected to attend the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit in the country in August. During a media briefing earlier this week, ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula dodged a question about whether the government would arrest Putin should he enter the country. South Africa as a member state of the ICC...

Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, will be attending the BRICS Summit in August this year, on invitation by the South African government. BRICS is a group of the world’s biggest emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and late-addition South Africa. The International Criminal Court in the Hague has issued a warrant of arrest for the Russian leader for war crimes stemming from the conflict with Ukraine that started over a year ago on 28 February 2022. The ICC warrant means that South Africa, a signatory to the ICC, will be obliged to arrest Mr Putin and hand him over if...

-snip- Opposition minority party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), has said Putin is welcome and EFF leader Julius Malema said that no one was going to arrest him in the country where Russia "played a huge role to support the struggle for freedom". -snip- "Putin is welcomed here. No one is going to arrest Putin. He [Putin] will address, finish all his meetings, and we will take him back to the airport," Mr Malema said. He continued: "We know our friends. We know the people who liberated us. We know the people who supported us." A spokesperson for President Cyril...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded the bulk of grain and fertiliser to be exported under the Black Sea Initiative must be channelled to Africa. -snip- Speaking to African government ministers on Monday during the International Parliamentary Conference, dubbed "Africa in a Multipolar World", in Moscow, Putin said his key demands were that Africans should be the biggest beneficiaries. "We insist on the package nature of this deal - above all, in the interests of African and other developing countries, considering that they need large amounts of food - we insist on full compliance with Russia's key requirements, first of...

On 19 and 20 March, some 40 African delegations travelled to Moscow ahead of the Russia-Africa summit scheduled for July in St Petersburg, to discuss cooperation and the fight against the influence of “former colonial powers”. There is but one step between Vladimir Putin’s office and the Duma in central Moscow. It was at the Russian parliament’s headquarters, just a few metres from the Kremlin, that the conference “Russia-Africa in a multipolar world” was held from 19-20 March, the second of its kind devoted to strengthening cooperation between African and Russian parliamentarians. The meeting came ahead of the next Africa-Russia...

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday said Moscow has written off the debts of African states worth more than $20 billion. -snip- "The states of Africa are constantly increasing their weight and their role in world affairs, they are asserting themselves more and more confidently in politics and in the economy. We are convinced that Africa will become one of the leaders in the emerging new multipolar world order," Putin added. He said Russia and the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are against the neo-colonial ideology. "Russia and African countries uphold moral norms and social principles traditional for...

Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM) Jaishankar predicted that the Asian Century will arrive upon his country and China finally resolving their border disputes, which Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin agreed with shortly thereafter. These two multipolar Great Powers are the world’s largest developing countries and are therefore capable of significantly influencing the global systemic transition to multipolarity. It therefore follows that maintaining stable relations and comprehensively building upon progress in this respect is among their most important grand strategic priorities. To this end, it’s absolutely imperative that no third parties meddle in this very sensitive issue. The declining American...

There are multiple tough strategic realities for the United States to absorb. Regardless of who wins the Ukrainian war, the United States will be the strategic loser. Russia will build closer relations with China and other countries on the Eurasian continent, including India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. It will turn irrevocably away from European democracies and Washington. Just as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger played the “China card” to isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War, presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will play their cards in a bid to contain U.S. global leadership. Knowing...

Despite the “rise and fall of the unipolar concert,” China and Russia’s balancing strategies have backfired: they are not leading to multipolarity, but are actually reinforcing unipolarity. The reason is that China and Russia’s balancing strategies have focused on regional “revisionism,” which has provoked powerful responses in East Asia and Europe to contain them. Russia’s balancing strategy has to a large extent proven to be counter-productive. Instead of preventing the expansion of NATO through a “divide and conquer” strategy, or driving a diplomatic wedge between the United States and Europe, Russian revisionism has united NATO...Perhaps most illustrative of all, a...

Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf has said that there is a national consensus in Pakistan on building strong relationship with the Russian Federation and government attaches great importance to its relations with Russia. The prime minister made these remarks while welcoming a delegation of the Council of Federation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation led by Ms Valentina Matvienko, Chairperson of the Council at Prime Minister House on Thursday. Russian Ambassador in Pakistan Andrey Bundnik also accompanied the chairperson. Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf said Russia was a source of peace and stability at both regional and global...

Beijing (AsiaNews) - Vladimir Putin, on a state visit to Beijing, and Hu Jintao, host of the summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a security and development body, have been busy with contracts, joint statements on Syria and Iran, loans and strategic co-operations. Meanwhile, the United States criticises both Moscow and Beijing for the position on Assad and announces plans to station 60 per cent of its naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region. Hu and Putin agreed yesterday in Beijing to increase trade to US$ 200 billion by 2020 from US$ 83.5 billion in 2011. They also saw the...

Moscow, June 17, Interfax - Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia supports the idea of a multi-polar world and has called for Russia to become one of its poles. "Politicians, economists are talking on the subject of multi-polarity. Everyone understands that the creation of a unipolar world with a single center of political and economic decision-making, could be dangerous for the entire globe, for all countries," the Patriarch said at a session on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Russian Peace Fund in Moscow, where he was awarded with this organization's golden medal. A unipolar world based...

BOAO, China : Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday that his country's future was inextricably linked to that of Asia, pushing the idea of a new multi-polar world order backed by the top emerging powers. Medvedev told a forum of past and present leaders in southern China that Moscow had no choice but to strengthen and develop its relations with countries across the region, and actively participate in regional groupings. "Russia's future, the modernisation of our Siberia and the Far East are inseparably connected with the Asia-Pacific region," the Russian president told delegates at the gathering in Boao on...

Looking for a sign of when the multipolar moment suddenly seemed real? You could do worse than mark the day when Brazil and Turkey -- two of the world's most avidly internationalist emerging powers -- joined together this May to announce they had stepped in to broker a nuclear-fuel swap deal with Iran that potentially -- though sadly not actually -- paved the way toward a peaceful solution to the standoff. Turkey and Brazil aren't superpowers, nor are they permanent U.N. Security Council members. But just as U.S. President Barack Obama came into office preaching a renewed focus on multilateralism,...

President Obama has disgraced the United States - again. During this week's nuclear summit in Washington, he bowed when greeting Chinese President Hu Jintao. The act was not only shocking but revealing. Mr. Obama has come under intense criticism for bowing to leaders in the past - the king of Saudi Arabia, the emperor of Japan. But never before has America's commander in chief prostrated himself to a foreign tyrant on U.S. soil. By bowing, Mr. Obama degraded and cheapened the office of the presidency; as commander in chief, he represents every American when meeting with other heads of state....

CARACAS, April 2 (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Venezuela on Friday to discuss oil, defense and nuclear energy cooperation with Latin America's main leftist foe of the United States, President Hugo Chavez. They were to launch a $20 billion venture between Russian firms and Venezuelan state company PDVSA to pump 450,000 barrels a day -- almost a fifth of the OPEC member's current output -- from the vast Orinoco heavy oil belt. Putin's 12-hour visit provides a welcome lift for Chavez, who is facing domestic and international criticism for failing to solve Venezuela's economic woes and attempting...

<p>US economic power is declining as a result of the financial crisis, the head of the World Bank has said.</p> <p>"One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," said World Bank president Robert Zoellick.</p>

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for a revamp of the global currency system, saying Thursday that the dollar's supremacy is outdated. "We need to ask the question: shouldn't a world that is politically multi-polar correspond to a multi-monetary world economically?" he said in a news conference during a summit of world leaders in L'Aquila, Italy. Sarkozy compared an overhaul of the global currency system to the enlargement of the Group of Eight structure to encompass fast-growing emerging economies, which were invited to join the Italian summit. He said the supremacy of the dollar belongs to the post-Second World War era...

Challenging the American Empire will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) this coming Monday and Tuesday for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. The SCO countries include former Soviet and CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO. The two overlapping groups, formally aligned in 2007, will be joined on...