The participants of the meeting in the “BRICS+/outreach” format sat around the round table in alphabetical order by country name, so the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan took adjacent places. From time to time they exchange opinions. The neighbors of the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko were the heads of delegations from Bolivia and Bangladesh, next to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were representatives of Serbia and Nicaragua. Moreover, the alphabetical order applied only to “friends of BRICS”—it did not apply to the leaders of the association itself.
On the tables of the plenary session participants were bottles of water and glasses with paper lids, notebooks with the emblem of the Kazan BRICS summit, souvenir pens and simultaneous translation machines. Representatives of about 40 states, including CIS countries, Asia, Africa, Latin America, as well as heads of international organizations, were invited to the meeting in the “BRICS+/outreach” format. Outreach practice refers to a regional approach, implying an invitation to the summit of leaders of countries geographically close to the presiding state. BRICS is an interstate association created in 2006 by Russia, China, India and Brazil; South Africa joined it in 2011. Since the beginning of 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have joined the group. On January 1, Russia's annual chairmanship in the organization began, it is held under the motto of strengthening multilateralism for equitable global development and security.
