Asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s alleged desire to attend the BRICS summit, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, according to the RIA news agency: “Clearly, heads of state who pursue such a hostile and unacceptable policy towards us , discussing with such emphasis and certainty that Russia should be isolated on the international stage, and sharing NATO’s common line of inflicting a so-called strategic defeat on us — such a leader is an unfit BRICS guest. “And we do not hide this approach, we have told (about it) our colleagues from South Africa. We expect that our point of view will be fully accepted”, Ryabkov said.

South Africa is now considering its legal options if Russian President Vladimir Putin decides to attend the BRICS summit because the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin in March over the war in Ukraine. South Africa is a member of the ICC and should theoretically arrest him if he attends the BRICS summit.

The BRICS group of emerging economies, made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is expected to hold a summit in Johannesburg in August.

In the meantime, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency of the United Nations, Rafael Grossi, will visit Russia tomorrow Friday, as the Interfax news agency reported today. Grossi is likely to hold talks on the Russian-controlled Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine.

According to Interfax, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Grossi would hold talks with Alexei Likachev, head of Russia’s state-run nuclear power company Rosatom. The meeting will take place in Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic coast between Lithuania and Poland, Ryabkov said.