Russia Pushes for setting up BRICS Parliamentary Forum

New Delhi, Feb 27 (IANS) Pushed increasingly into a corner by western sanctions over Ukraine, Russia Friday stressed on the relevance of the Russia-India-China troika in "ensuring international and regional stability and security" and setting up a BRICS inter-parliamentary forum.

Sergey Naryshkin, speaker of the Russian parliament, said the Russia-India-China (RIC) grouping "reinstates once again the impossibility of creating a unipolar world", referring to the US which has been leading the sanctions against Russia over the unrest in eastern Ukraine.

"The Russia-India-China troika is becoming each year more weighty factor internationally in ensuring international and regional stability and security," he said at the Russian Cultural Centre here.

"I want to state that strengthening relations in the RIC is to strengthen security in the world."

Naryshkin also said that they are working on the possibility of "creating a parliamentary dimension of BRICS" - the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The BRICS summit is to be held in Ufa city in Russia in July 2015.

"Within our chairmanship of BRICS we are planning to have a parliamentary forum in Moscow in April," he said, adding that it would be a meeting of the heads of parliament of BRICS countries.

"We are working on the agenda of the BRICS meetings and the parliamentary dimension," Naryshkin added.

He said during the Russia-India inter-parliamentary forum meeting here on Thursday, he had suggested holding a parliamentary format in the RIC format too.

The RIC countries held the 13th Foreign Ministers Meeting in Beijing earlier this month.

Earlier, during a talk at the Observer Research Foundation, Naryshkin said Russia would be chair of the BRICS this year and the Russian Duma had ratified the setting up of the BRICS Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), which were agreed upon during the last BRICS summit in Brazil in July last year.

The BRICS summit had agreed to set up a New Development Bank (NDB) with an initial capital of $50 billion, contributed equally by all the five countries. This would eventually go up to $100 billion over time.

They also agreed to set up a Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) or a reserve pool of currencies of $100 billion to serve as a cushion against temporary balance of payment difficulties.

The two institutions are designed to serve as alternatives to the West-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).