In his address to the BRICS summit, President Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine and the West for his country's invasion of Ukraine. It didn't appear to gain traction with other leaders from the bloc.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have failed in his attempt at the BRICS summit in Sandton to drum up support from fellow leaders of the bloc for his war effort in Ukraine.

Putin, addressing the summit by video from Moscow, presented a narrative of his invasion of Ukraine as effectively an act of self-defence against Ukraine and the West for mounting a coup in Ukraine in 2014 against the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and then attacking pro-Russian elements in Ukraine's Donbas region.

But the other four BRICS leaders who were physically present at the summit - President Cyril Ramaphosa, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazilian President Lula da Silva and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not publicly support his justification in their responses.

Putin blamed the Ukraine war, by implication, on the West. He said "some countries" - a clear reference to the US and other countries of the West - were promoting their own hegemony in pursuit of a policy of ongoing colonialism and neo-colonialism.

He said their aspirations for hegemony in the world had led to the dire crisis in Ukraine. They had supported an unconstitutional coup in Ukraine and after that, they launched a war of...