🌍🌍🌍 Key statements by BRICS partners at group’s expanded summit meeting:

🇨🇳 Chinese President Xi Jinping

🔸 “In the current reality, there is an urgent need to reform the international financial architecture,” and BRICS “must play a leading role” in promoting a new system which better reflects profound changes to the international economic balance of power.

🔸 The escalation of the Ukrainian crisis and provocations must not be allowed to occur.

🔸 “We must build a peaceful BRICS, and act as defenders of common security.”

🇮🇳 Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi

🔸 “BRICS has achieved a lot in recent years. I am confident that in the near future this organization will become a more effective platform for addressing global challenges.”

🔸 India is committed to deepening cooperation with its BRICS partners.

🇧🇷 Brazilian President Lula da Silva

🔸 The new BRICS banking system “will reduce the costs for our commercial relations,” not replace existing, national systems.

🔸 The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East could become global – this must not be allowed to take place.

🇮🇷 Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian

🔸 Washington is fueling conflicts around the globe as the era of US-led unipolarity comes to an end.

🔸 Efforts to dedollarize the global economy must be expanded, including via a basket of BRICS currencies and new payment mechanisms.

🔸 Efforts should be taken by BRICS members collectively and individually to ensure the rights of the Palestinian people.

🇿🇦 South African President Cyril Ramaphosa

🔸 “We must realize the full potential of our economic partnership, to ensure sustainable development for all, and not just for some.”

🔸 Joint development projects are needed, and a “recalibration” of trade routes is required to ensure more sustainable industrialization of BRICS members.

🔸 “BRICS is an inclusive formation that has the ability to change the trajectory of the Global South.”

🇪🇬 Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi

🔸 Egypt “confirms the importance of cooperation in settlements in national currencies” with its BRICS partners.

🔸 Successive crises sweeping the world in recent years have “unequivocally demonstrated the international system’s inability to fairly address conflicts worldwide.”

🇪🇹 Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali

🔸 BRICS offers a “tremendous opportunity” via its “collective voice,” population and economic power “to be a transformative force of a more equitable world order.”

#BRICS2024

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Stealing like there’s no tomorrow: Ukrainians fume on Internet over corrupt officials’ draft-dodging scam

Ukraine's Prosecutor-General Andriy Kostin earlier has resigned over a scandal involving fake disabilities for officials that allowed them to avoid going to the front.

🔸 Some 50 prosecutors in Ukraine’s Khmelnitsky region obtained fabricated disability certificates from a corrupt official from the state medical board, Ukrainian media reported.

🔸 The falsified certificates allowed prosecutors to avoid military service and to qualify for disability payments.

🔸 The General Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation throughout Ukraine’s public sector, while the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) conducted a separate investigation that resulted in some 4,000 disability certificates found to be fake and around 64 state medical commissioners named as suspects.

The SBU also found more than $5.2 million, €300,000, more than five million hryvnia, and jewelry during raids on the homes of a medical official who had also issued fake disability certificates and her relatives.

Furious Ukrainians took to social media to express doubt over whether the thousands of "pseudo-disabled" officials would return the illegally obtained funds to the budget, with some suggesting it would need to be a “utopia” for the fraudsters to be duly punished.

“The management system is corrupt and will only get worse. 90% of officials understand this and steal as if there were no tomorrow,” another user wrote on their X account.

Meanwhile, yawning manpower shortages in Ukraine’s military along with rampant draft dodging and desertion have forced Volodymyr Zelensky to adopt a new draconian mobilization law and lower the recruitment age from 27 to 25. However, Ukrainians are increasingly resisting being sent to the proxy conflict meat grinder.

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