MOSCOW, October 25. /TASS/. BRICS is not an anti-Western association and stays open to cooperation, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister and BRICS Sherpa Sergey Ryabkov said after the summit of the association in Kazan.

"BRICS is not an anti-Western association. We say so outright. We call things by their proper names. We are open to cooperation. Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly stated this yesterday. But we will not allow anyone to disregard our interests and to try to lecture us, the participants in the BRICS association, which has already grown two-fold, on how we should live and what we should do, including in the sphere of cooperation in economics, finance and trade," the senior diplomat emphasized.

Ryabkov noted that the West continued to use its reserve currencies as weapons to quash dissent.

"We in the BRICS group have responded directly and straightforwardly to what has been happening around us in terms of destroying the normal basis for the functioning of the previously called global world economy, the world financial system, where the West is trying hard to preserve its monopoly, its dominant positions and continues to use its reserve currencies as weapons in attempts to suppress the undesirable," Ryabkov pointed out.