Brian McDonald: Too rich for BRICS, too Russian for Brussels

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 7/23/25

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

Not in the atlas—that part’s clear. Russia’s right where it’s always been, draped across the continents like a great old beast, spine deep in Siberia, face still turned—half-defiantly—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 Brazil and South Africa in that loose alphabet of ambition we call BRICS?

The numbers say one thing. The stories we tell say another. And somewhere between the two lies the truth—stubborn, shifting, and hard to hold.

Take the latest data measured by the IMF. Russia’s PPP-adjusted average (net) salary now sits at $3,340 a month—a not-so-gentle reminder that this is no longer an “emerging market” in any serious sense. That puts it above Italy ($3,307), Czechia ($3,022), and Lithuania ($2,870). It’s knocking at the door of Spain ($3,459) and not far off the UK ($3,597). And the direction of travel matters: 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. China stands at around $2,000, a full tier above Brazil ($1,210), India ($900), or South Africa ($965). For all of China’s rise—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. The shelves are fuller, the flats warmer and better air conditioned, the middle class—however bruised—more securely anchored. This isn’t the landscape of unfinished industrial revolutions or sprawling poverty. And yet, BRICS was never really about income. It was about leverage. A counterweight. A refusal to accept the world as arranged in Brussels or Washington. And here, Russia fits like a clenched fist: sanctioned, ringed by rivals, yet impossible to ignore. A battle-scarred heavyweight among rising strivers.

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

And those are just the visible figures. The informal economy is vast, anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of GDP by some estimates. Wages are paid in cash, favours, or silence. The real economy—the one people actually live in—moves in ways no spreadsheet can mode

But even through the distortion, a picture emerges. This isn’t India or Brazil. It isn’t South Africa. Not in income, not in infrastructure, not in 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. 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. 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 policy. Comes alignment. Comes strategy.

It’s not just rhetoric, either. Russia is rebuilding itself in the image of South Korea’s chaebols—not through design, perhaps, but necessity. The old oligarch model is being nudged aside. In its place: corporate giants like Severstal, Norilsk Nickel, Rosatom, sprawling, vertically integrated, 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 blinking, that over $2 trillion net was “ripped out of Russia” between 1991 and 2021. 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. 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. Not anymore.

It’s been a long while in the cold now. Years of it. Locked out, boxed in, 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—brushed with the same shade of guilt.

Some of it, of course, is Russia’s own making. 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. Not just on the map, but in the marrow. In its music, its cathedrals, its tragedies. In the long, bleak arc of its novels. It suffers like Europe. It thinks like Europe. 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, branching into the same soil as Rome and Athens?

That Western Europe has chosen to forget this—out of fear, fury, or fatigue—is a tragedy. 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 name it.

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