The decision by the Portuguese UN Secretary General António Guterres to attend a summit hosted by Vladimir Putin has met with criticism from Ukraine and its allies.
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00:00Welcome to Kazan.
00:02The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, arrived in Russia's city of Kazan on Wednesday
00:08for the BRICS summit hosted by President Vladimir Putin.
00:12His attendance, in light of Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, has been controversial,
00:18with the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry describing it as a wrong choice.
00:22Another controversial attendee is Turkey's Recep Erdogan, a NATO member historically
00:27aligned with the West.
00:32Putin has already met with several members in the BRICS alliance, including India's Narendra
00:36Modi and China's Xi Jinping.
00:39The summit is sending jitters across Europe as the ever-growing club hopes to rival the
00:44Western economic hegemony.
00:46The bloc is now two and a half times the EU's economic size.
00:51High on the agenda are discussions on forming an alternative payment system for trade between
00:56members in local currencies, to bypass the dollar-based network, as well as other ways
01:01of promoting alternatives to the US-led global order.