BRICS leaders to meet next time in Nov. at G20 summit - Russian diplomat

UFA, July 9. /TASS/. The next informal meeting of BRICS leaders will be held at the G20 summit due in November this year in Turkey, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told reporters on Thursday. "The plan for the upcoming period after the summit demands our intense work," Ryabkov said. "The next meeting will take place on the sidelines of the summit of the Group of Twenty to be held in Antalya in mid-November," he said adding: "There is a significant achievement. We are holding the summit worthily." "We are working out all the "hot" issues of foreign policy. This is done systematically and not from time to time. This concerns the issues of security and nonproliferation - I hope all these issues will be reflected in the Ufa declaration," he said. Leaders of Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa are due to take part in a BRICS summit in Ufa, the capital of Russia's Volga republic of Bashkiria, on Thursday. The summit’s key topic is "BRICS Partnership - a Powerful Factor in Global Development," Russian president’s aide Yuri Ushakov earlier told journalists. Established in June 2006, the BRIC association originally included four countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India and China to be expanded to the BRICS format after South Africa joined it in 2011. Its goal is to promote active, pragmatic, open and transparent dialogue and cooperation between its member countries. The BRICS is an off-bloc association aimed at no third parties. The first official summit of the association was held in Russia’s Yekaterinburg in June 2009. Ever since, summit meetings have been held annually in each of the member states alternatively. The latest summit took place in Brazil. Russia took over presidency in the BRICS from April 1, 2015. Russia is also presiding the BRICS Business Council in a period from April 2015 to April 2016. One of the goals of Russia’s presidency is to implement the agreements on the establishment of BRICS own financial institutions, namely the New Development Bank of BRICS (NDB) and Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA), a pool of foreign exchange reserves intended to solve problems with liquidity. Read more