MOSCOW, March 13. /TASS/. BRICS would risk losing its current momentum if the intergovernmental association were to establish a centralized governing structure, for example, a secretariat, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister and Russian BRICS Sherpa Sergey Ryabkov said in an interview for the premier issue of the TASS "BRICS Bulletin."
"That (the BRICS needs a secretariat - TASS) is not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is the opposite: that such structures are not needed. If we create them, we will lose the BRICS’ forward momentum, its networked nature," the senior diplomat said, answering a question about whether centralized governing structures and a secretariat were needed in the association.
According to Ryabkov, in the process of creating such structures, BRICS would quickly find itself in a situation where the international bureaucracy, even if was organized in the BRICS format, would begin to develop its own agenda and gradually impose it on national governments. "Given that the BRICS a priori denies any diktat, any imposition, we do not need it," he stressed.
Answering a question on whether Russia needs a special dedicated structure that would deal with BRICS, Ryabkov pointed out that at the stage of preparing Russia for its current rotating chairmanship, the organizing committee coped with such a role perfectly. "And in the current regime, the Foreign Ministry, guided by the presidential decree by its powers as the coordinator of foreign policy activities, performs daily work on interdepartmental coordination, convergence of approaches and rebuilding everything necessary in a given system of coordinate," the deputy foreign minister added.
Russia assumed the one-year rotating chairmanship of the 10-member BRICS intergovernmental group on January 1, 2024. On Moscow’s watch, BRICS will carry out over 200 events covering a wide range of issues. The key event of Russia’s chairmanship will be the BRICS summit in October 2024 in Kazan, Tatarstan, in Russia’s Volga region.