Vladimir Putin’s core message to his counterparts at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is a call to collectively build an independent path to development. He is urging the bloc to forge a future free from the economic and political constraints imposed by the Western-led global order.
He identifies the main obstacle to this independent path as the “discriminatory sanctions” from the US and EU, which he claims are designed to “hinder” the progress of emerging nations. A united front against such measures is, in his view, the first step toward true sovereignty.
The blueprint for this path is the Russia-China model: deep economic partnership, a focus on shared infrastructure, and a decisive shift away from the US dollar to secure financial autonomy. Putin presents their $100 billion trade growth as evidence of this path’s viability.
The SCO summit is the workshop where Putin hopes to start building this path on a larger scale. He is calling for the mobilization of the bloc’s resources and political will to create a self-sustaining ecosystem for growth, thereby realizing his vision of a “fairer, multipolar world.”