Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accepted the Kremlin’s invitation to attend the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan next month, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov said on Tuesday.
“The proposal was conveyed to the Turkish side, [and] Erdogan accepted it,” Ushakov told the Interfax news agency.
The statement comes after Bloomberg reported on Monday that Türkiye had applied for BRICS membership. According to the outlet, Ankara submitted an application “some months ago,” partially driven by “rifts” between Türkiye and the rest of NATO over the Ukraine conflict.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Omer Celik, a spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling AK party, confirmed that the application process is “ongoing.” Celik did not say exactly when Türkiye submitted its application, but Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stated in June that Ankara intended to join the bloc, before discussing the matter with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Türkiye is the first NATO state to seek membership of the non-Western BRICS group.
Since the term was first coined in 2001, BRICS has grown from an acronym into an informal alliance that has overtaken the US-led G7 bloc in its share of global GDP, has its own development bank, and has expanded from four members – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – to nine, including South Africa, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.
Erdogan has attended BRICS summits before, but never as a prospective member of the bloc. Earlier this year, anonymous Turkish officials told Middle East Eye that tensions with the European Union had forced Ankara to look elsewhere for new economic partners.
“We don’t see Brics as an alternative to NATO or the EU,” one official said. “However, the stalled accession process to the European Union encourages us to explore other economic platforms.”
The official added that, while NATO’s other 31 member states are “on-paper allies” of Türkiye, they often overlook Ankara’s security concerns and deny it the latest military equipment.
“We would like to be part of every multilateral platform, even if there is only a slight chance of benefit to us,” the official explained
As of Tuesday afternoon, Erdogan’s office had not confirmed the president’s participation in the Kazan summit. The gathering is set to take place on October 22-24 in the southwestern Russian city.