NIZHNIY NOVGOROD, June 11. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Venezuelan counterpart Yvan Gil Pinto signed a memorandum on cooperation in countering unilateral sanctions on the sidelines of the BRICS ministerial meeting, a TASS correspondent reported.
The meeting of BRICS foreign ministers is being held in Nizhny Novgorod on June 10-11.
The BRICS group has now gone through two waves of expansion since its inception in 2006. First, in 2011, South Africa joined founding members Brazil, Russia, India and China. Then, in August 2023, six new members, including Argentina, were invited to join BRICS after the intergovernmental group’s summit in Johannesburg. However, in December 2023, the new Argentinian government of President Javier Milei announced that it had declined the invitation for the time being because it considered integration with BRICS impractical. The five new members - Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - began working as full-fledged BRICS member states since January 1.
Russia has assumed the rotating BRICS chairmanship on January 1, 2024. It will last until the end of the year and will include more than 250 events. The main event will be the BRICS Summit in Kazan in October 2024.