The Center for Countering Disinformation analyzes the russian state duma speaker’s statement regarding the creation of a new geopolitical alliance with China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico and Iran.
Russia believes that it will be able to create an alternative to the G7, an international club of governments of seven highly developed countries – the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada. In 1997, russia joined the G7 countries, so they became known as the G8. But in 2014, russia was kicked out for the illegal annexation of Crimea and the start of the war against Ukraine.
Russian propaganda presented the russian federation speaker’s statement on the eve of the day as a fait accompli. Russia’s plans to create an analog of the G20, which will include African and South American countries with low living standards.
However, it is unlikely that these countries agree with such an initiative of the state duma speaker, whose country suffers from international sanctions. Given their trade with the US and the EU, alternative geopolitical alliances to emphasize russia’s economic and unifying greatness are doubtful. In particular, Brazil, China, Mexico, and India have long been invited to G7 meetings and considered potential partners.
It is also worth noting that only 10 countries congratulated putin on russia’s day: North Korea, Belarus, Turkmenistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Nicaragua. There are no potential partners of the russian G8 coalition among them.
At the beginning of the year, the IMF released a report on the GDP of countries in 2021, its growth dynamics, and forecast values for 2022 and 2023. The development of an economy is determined by the level of GDP. According to the IMF, before the russian invasion of Ukraine, the top 10 most powerful economies in the world were:
1. The United States – $22.9 trillion
2. China – $16.9 trillion
3. Japan – $5.1 trillion
4. Germany – $4.2 trillion
5. Great Britain – $3.1 trillion
6. India – $2.9 trillion
7. France – $2.9 trillion
8. Italy – $2.1 trillion
9. Canada – $2 trillion
10. South Korea – $1.8 trillion
11. Russia – $1.6 trillion
12. Brazil – $1.6 trillion
Mexico with a GDP of $1.3 trillion ranks 15th, Indonesia with $1.2 trillion is 16th, Iran with $1.1 trillion is 17th, and Turkey ranks 21st with a GDP of $0.8 trillion.
If the IMF data mentioned above is to be recalculated honestly, the total GDP of the potential G8 would be $27.4 trillion, while the G7 countries would have $42.3 trillion. However, the speaker of the russian state duma decided to calculate the total GDP at purchasing power parity, i.e., taking into account the price level in the country’s economy and the purchasing power of the currency. And it turned out that the “new eight” is ahead of the “old” by almost $10 trillion, or 24.4%.
It’s also worth considering that propagandists have been manipulating the figures since 2021, even before sanctions were imposed on russia. According to IMF forecasts, already this year, russia will lose ground to Indonesia, among others, in terms of purchasing power parity.
As such, the manipulative statement about a new russian geopolitical alliance is primarily aimed at the russian population and is a reflection on Boris Johnson’s similar initiative for a regional defense alliance of Britain, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states.
Thus, the idea of uniting with the countries that did not support anti-russian sanctions is elites geopolitical complex of the russian under-empire to claim their own greatness and has neither political nor economic objective grounds. It should be viewed as another propagandist deception in the context of the narrative “we will live better in ten years – but we must be patient”.
