HONG KONG, June 6. /TASS/. The international community is growing weary of the "neocolonial manners" of Western elites, Russia’s Ambassador to China Igor Morgulov has said in an opinion column in the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post.

"The international community is growing weary of the pressure and neocolonial manners of the Western elite," he said.

Morgulov noted that the expansion of BRICS enabled developing countries to play an increasingly important role in the international arena.

"Tectonic shifts are leading to the emergence of a more just multipolar world order. The unipolar model, which for centuries served the interests of the so-called 'collective West' and fueled their excessive consumption at the expense of other nations, is receding," he pointed out.

On June 10-11, Nizhny Novgorod will host a BRICS foreign ministers' meeting. Earlier, Pavel Knyazev, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s special envoy and sous-sherpa in BRICS, said that he expected about 20-25 countries, including the "top ten" of the association, to attend the event.

The BRICS group has seen two waves of expansion since its establishment in 2006. In 2011, South Africa joined the original group, which included Brazil, Russia, India and China. In August 2023, six new members, including Argentina, were invited to join the association at once, but Buenos Aires changed its mind in late December. The five new members - Egypt, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Ethiopia - began full-fledged activities in BRICS on January 1, 2024.