As Europe continues to spar with Washington over the proposed Ukraine peace deal, having already pared the original 28-point plan down to 19, one striking feature stands out in both the initial Witkoff–Dimitriev blueprint and the Europeans’ counter-proposal: a call for Russia to rejoin the Group of Eight. Moscow was suspended from the G8 in 2014 after its annexation of Crimea, and formally withdrew in 2017. Yet despite its inclusion in both plans, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have publicly rejected any move to bring Russia back into the fold.
Formed amid the economic turmoil of the mid-Seventies to facilitate closer coordination among the world’s largest and wealthiest economies, the original G7 comprised Britain, Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States. It was then expanded to include Russia in 1997, despite the fact that the post-Soviet economy was cratering (the country defaulted on its domestic debt the following year). Inclusion in the G7 was a sop to then-Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, who oversaw the oligarchic looting of his nation’s economy. Expanding the G7 to include Russia was accepted by Western states at the time, as they knew Moscow was too supine to cause them any trouble.
Needless to say, things have changed in the decades since. Today, not only is China now one of the largest economies in the world, but the Indian economy is also larger than several members of the old G7. Russia itself has a larger economy than Canada and by some estimates Italy, despite having been squeezed by sanctions for the last three years since the invasion of Ukraine and having its foreign assets and gold reserves seized in 2023.
What’s more, the G7 is now arguably overshadowed by the G20, another coordinating group which includes more dynamic emerging economies such as Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey — as well as Russia. The resilience of Moscow’s economy, running hot on military spending and sanction-busting exports of fossil fuels, indicates the failure of Western efforts to cripple Putin’s war machine.
Economic rankings that treat Russia’s self-sufficiency in energy, raw materials and defence industries as equivalent in dollar value to Western, service-heavy economies built on tourism, streaming platforms and delivery apps have proved to be unreliable guides for crafting strategy in an emerging multipolar order. So why, then, are Western governments largely comfortable with the idea of Russia returning to the G8, even though Moscow is far stronger today than it was in Yeltsin’s era?
Framed by international media as helping Russia return to the “world stage”, the move to recompose the G8 should be seen less as a concession to Putin than a means of keeping European states relevant. After all, throughout the duration of the war Russia has retained its membership of the G20 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, while also spurring the growth of the Brics forum.
The notion that Russia has been frozen out of international relations is nonsense. If some version of the Witkoff-Dimitriev deal is eventually signed, the risk for European states is that they that are frozen out of the rapprochement between Moscow and Washington, with Britain and France potentially isolated on the UN Security Council by a new triumvirate of the US, Russia and China. Given that the old Western states are drowned out in the G20, a newly recomposed G8 is one way they can retain their international stature while diluting the prospect of a Moscow-Washington axis. Whether or not Russia rejoins the G8, one thing is for sure: the old hegemonic groups through which Western states sought to steer the world economy and international order are now defunct.