According to South Africa's ambassador to BRICS, Anil Sooklal, the proposal to expand the bloc will be one of its main focuses this year. Speaking in an interview with the Russian news agency, TASS, this week, Sooklal said that at a meeting "in early February in South Africa, we started discussing the expansion of BRICS, thus beginning to carry out the decision made in June 2022 at the BRICS summit to develop criteria for accepting new countries into the group."