Washington’s closest allies increasingly want to chart their own course without relying on the White House, Sergey Naryshkin says
A growing number of US partners are trying to deviate from Washington’s policies and want Russia to drive the nail home when it comes to the Ukraine crisis, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has said.
In an interview with the Russian magazine Razvedchik (“Spy”) on Tuesday, Sergey Naryshkin argued that the West was having a hard time acknowledging that its global clout is waning. In the case of the United States, this sentiment stems from the fact that the country remains a technological and military powerhouse, and the dollar is the main reserve currency, he said.
Nevertheless, Washington’s global authority is “sagging,” the spy chief claimed. “Even America’s closest allies are increasingly less likely to look back on the White House as they try to expand their own boundaries of what is possible in politics and economics. You cannot imagine how many US partners from Asian, African, and Latin American countries are asking us… not to stop halfway in the Ukraine conflict,” Naryshkin said.
This is partly due to the fact that the West “is literally slaughtering its own ‘sacred cows’,” including the principle that private property cannot simply be taken away from its owner, he suggested. Naryshkin was apparently referring to the West’s decision to freeze around $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets and use the profits to prop up Ukraine. Moscow has denounced the move as “theft.”
“Everyone knows that any state can end up in Russia’s position,” Naryshkin added.
All those events are pushing the global majority to seek more independence, he continued. “We are witnessing a genuine decolonization of the Global South, which has begun to see itself as a full-fledged geopolitical subject, and not as someone’s backyard.”
This principle also applies to the BRICS economic group, according to Naryshkin, which he called an “alliance of equal… civilizations working together to find answers to the most pressing challenges of our time while taking into account national interests.” The G7 group, which consists of “US satellites” and embodies a unipolar world, is the past, and BRICS is the future, he claimed.
BRICS is an acronym for five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. In 2024, four more countries officially joined the bloc: Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. The group has partnership relations with a dozen more. It accounts for about 46% of the world’s population and over 36% of global GDP, according to estimates by global financial institutions.
