Too rich for BRICS, too Russian for Brussels

Sanctioned by the West, aligned with the Global South, but still dreaming in European cadences; Moscow’s place in the world is as unsettled as ever

There are questions that sound overly academic and wonkish until you realise entire wars have been built on their answers. One of them, weighed down with history and the kind of political quicksand that swallows men faster than bullets, is this: Where does Russia belong?

We aren't talking about the atlas because that part’s clear; Russia’s right where it’s always been, draped across the continents like a great old beast, its spine deep in Siberia, and its face still turned toward Europe. But if you look past the borders and into the bones, the question comes again… what is it now?

Is it still the outlier in the European family; wounded, estranged, but recognisably kin or has it thrown in its lot with the Global South, shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Brazil and South Africa in that loose alphabet of ambition known as BRICS?

Well, the numbers they say one thing, but the stories we tell say another and somewhere between the two lies the truth; stubborn, shifting, and extremely hard to hold.

Take the latest data measured by the IMF which shows Russia’s PPP-adjusted average (net) salary now sits at $2,752 a month; a not-so-gentle reminder that this is no longer an “emerging market” in any serious sense. That puts it above Malta ($2,691), Hungary ($2,628), Estonia ($2,552) and Portugal ($2,440) and it’s knocking at the door of Slovenia ($2,807) and not far off Lithuania ($2,870). And the direction of travel matters because incomes in ruble terms rose 16% year-on-year, according to Rosstat. The numbers aren’t just big, they’re getting bigger.

Then we look at BRICS where China stands at around $2,000 (close to Georgia’s $1,837), a full tier above Brazil ($1,210), India ($900), or South Africa ($965). For a bit of a reality check, this trio are all below Europe’s poorest country, Ukraine ($1,351). For all of China’s rise, with its bullet trains, high-rises, and sprawling megacities, Russian living standards remain, on average, markedly higher.

It doesn't really swim in the same waters as its BRICS partners, given its shelves are fuller, the flats warmer and better air conditioned, and the middle class more securely anchored. This isn’t the landscape of unfinished industrial revolutions or sprawling poverty, but BRICS was never really about economics… rather it was about leverage. A counterweight and a refusal to accept the world as arranged in Brussels or Washington. And it’s here Russia fits like a clenched fist as it’s sanctioned, ringed by rivals, yet impossible to ignore; a battle-scarred heavyweight among rising strivers.

But averages are for economists and liars and Russia remains a country of gulfs, not gradients. The gap between richest and poorest regions has now hit a record 182,000 rubles per month; a difference of $2,330. In Chukotka, the average salary’s $2,855, but in Ingushetia, it’s $525. In Moscow, Yamalo-Nenets, and Magadan you can clear $1,850, whereas in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ossetia you’ll be lucky to get past $600.

And those are just the visible figures because the informal economy is vast, anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of GDP, depending on who you ask. Wages are paid in cash, favours, or silence while the real economy (the one people actually live in, lest we forget) moves in ways no spreadsheet can evaluate.

But even through the distortion, a picture emerges and it's a world away from India or Brazil or South Africa and it’s clear that when it comes to income, infrastructure, and human capital, Russia is something else. Wealthier than it lets on, more developed than many would like to admit, and far harder to categorise than any acronym can allow.

Still, the Kremlin has made its choice and it’s not just in trade, but in tone.

“European markets, European economies; these are dying economies,” said Maxim Oreshkin, Putin’s top economic aide, standing at a forum outside Moscow, this week, like a man delivering last rites. “Germany has been in stagnation for years.” In his eyes, only India compares to Russia in long-term potential; but even there, he says, “the mentality” stifles initiative.

You may scoff, or you might nod along, but you can’t ignore it; this is how the Kremlin sees the world in 2025. And from that vision comes its policies, its alignment and its strategy.

It’s not just rhetoric, either, because Russia is rebuilding itself in the image of South Korea’s chaebols; not through design, perhaps, but necessity. The old Western-centric oligarch model is being nudged aside and in its place corporate giants like Severstal, Norilsk Nickel, and Rosatom are sprawling, vertically integrated and politically aligned.

Billionaire Alexei Mordashov has warned this shift comes with risks; monopolies, stagnation, a strangling of small business. But is it worse than what came before? The era when Roman Abramovich, Mikhail Friedman, Andrey Melnichenko stripped billions out of the country, bought mansions in London, chalets in Switzerland, parked their yachts in the Med, and passed through airports with more passports than principles?

One Moscow tycoon told me last year, without any tone of doubt in his voice, that over $2 trillion net was “ripped out of Russia” between 1991 and 2021. It’s a staggering sum, a slow bleed, year by year. Maybe now, at last, the arteries are being tied off.

So again we ask... where does Russia belong?

Not in BRICS, if we’re talking economic fundamentals because its income levels, industrial base, and urban development look more like Warsaw or Milan than Pretoria or São Paulo. It may trade with the Global South, but it doesn’t live like it.

And yet… it doesn’t quite belong in Europe either. Not politically at least, certainly not anymore.

It’s been a long while in the cold now. Locked out, boxed in, and talked about in every room but never let through the door. NATO’s right up at the fence, sufficiently close to hear it breathe and all the while, Western Europe pulls its collar up and crosses the street. Brussels has been doing its best impression of a fainting duchess, pretending this is all one-way traffic; as if history were a thing that only happens to other people and every Russian artist, every athlete, every voice with that distinctive accent, is brushed with the same shade of guilt.

Some of it, of course, is Moscow’s own making and there’s no getting around that. But by no means is all of it and the effect’s the same either way: a continent turning away from a country that once helped shape its soul.

Because let’s not kid ourselves; Russia is European and not just on the map, but in the marrow. In its music, its cathedrals, its tragedies and in the long, bleak arc of its novels. It suffers like Europe and it thinks like Europe and it dreams in the same key.

What are Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, if not European masters? What is Tchaikovsky if not the echo of a continent? Have we forgotten Tarkovsky? Shostakovich and his Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?

What of Orthodox Christianity, born of Byzantium, rooted in Constantinople and branching into the same soil as Rome and Athens?

That Western Europe has chosen to forget this is a tragedy, but that Russia might forget it too would be a far greater one.

So no, Russia doesn’t fit neatly into BRICS, but neither is it fully out of Europe. It’s caught between orbits, spinning under a sky that no longer knows how to classify it.

Maybe that’s the most Russian place to be of all.