Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) occupied an important, though not priority, place in Moscow’s foreign-policy calculations. By the mid-2000s, the organization had largely fulfilled its original tasks: it contributed to regional security, helped maintain manageability during the first post-Soviet decade of transition, and contained terrorist threats. By the mid-2010s, however, the SCO had entered a period of stagnation, without a clear trajectory for further development. The organization received a new impulse in 2015−2017, when the gradual expansion of its membership began.
The accession of India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus transformed the SCO from a primarily Eurasian grouping of Russia, China, and the Central Asian states into an organization with a more global reach. At the same time, expansion called into question its ability to develop and implement collective decisions. The example of India and Pakistan is telling: the two countries have been in sustained confrontation since gaining independence. In 2025, their rivalry once again escalated into a brief armed conflict. The SCO, originally conceived as a security organization, was unable to play any significant role in resolving the situation, even though both parties to the conflict are members of the organization.
Moscow clearly preferred BRICS as a platform for promoting its own vision of a multipolar world and developing dialogue with the “Global South.” The SCO remained rather an additional instrument, designed with the future in mind. After February 2022, however, its importance for Moscow increased sharply.
As Western governments intensified their efforts to isolate Russia internationally, and the Kremlin sought to convey its own interpretation of the causes and course of the war, the SCO became a convenient platform for promoting the Russian position. Alongside BRICS, Moscow placed its bets on the SCO as one of two key instruments for mitigating the negative consequences of the war. Many of Moscow’s initial plans, however, were never realized.
What Russia Wanted from the SCO
First, Moscow sought to demonstrate that Russia was not isolated and that, despite numerous rounds of Western sanctions, it remained an acceptable partner for the “Global Majority.” At the 2022 SCO summit in Samarkand, Vladimir Putin stressed the scale of the organization: “the largest regional organization in the world”, stating that “over half of the world’s population lives in SCO member states, which account for about 25 percent of global GDP and have a powerful intellectual and technological potential and a considerable part of global natural resources”. In doing so, the Russian president presented the SCO no longer simply as a regional forum, but as a grouping with global weight and agenda.
Putin also argued that SCO countries interact on the basis of “universally recognized principles of the rule of international law and the UN Charter, namely, equal and indivisible security and respect for each other’s sovereignty, national values and interests”. This rhetoric, in effect, offered an alternative to the transatlantic community, which Putin had described only days before the summit as an instrument of American “dictatorship” that sacrifices Europe’s interests and forces European countries to impose sanctions against Russia.
The timing of the Samarkand summit was of fundamental importance. It took place less than two weeks after the G7 countries agreed to introduce a price cap on Russian oil—a measure that directly affected the interests of the two largest SCO members, China and India. Putin did not demand open support from his partners for Russia’s war against Ukraine. Instead, Moscow sought solidarity in opposing sanctions and “Western interventionism.” This framing allowed the Kremlin to appeal to the shared interests of the organization’s members without forcing them to explicitly approve Russia’s actions.
Second, Moscow regarded the SCO as one of the key—after BRICS—platforms for promoting its own vision of a multipolar world. Russian rhetoric was based on contrasting sovereignty with liberal interventionism, national currencies with dependence on the dollar, and a policy of non-interference with external political dictate. At the 2024 SCO summit in Astana, Putin declared that “the multipolar world has become a reality” and described the SCO and BRICS as “the main pillars of this new world order.” By 2026, the emphasis in his rhetoric had shifted: multipolarity came to be described more as an emerging order than as an already accomplished fact.
Third, Russia hoped to secure political support from SCO members on the question of Ukraine. In Moscow’s ideal scenario, the organization could have issued a collective statement placing responsibility for the war on NATO expansion, Western interference in Ukrainian affairs, and disregard for Russia’s security interests in the region. It is difficult to imagine, however, that even in its most ambitious plans Moscow could have expected the SCO to recognize Russia’s territorial gains. Even Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, still does not recognize Crimea, annexed back in 2014, as part of Russia.
Moscow’s realistic expectations were considerably more modest. Russia expected SCO members not to openly condemn its actions, to abstain in relevant UN votes, not to join Western sanctions, and not to provide Ukraine with significant military or other support. Thus, what was required of its partners was not so much active approval of Russian policy as a refusal to join efforts to contain it.
Fourth, Moscow sought—as with the BRICS countries—to deepen economic cooperation within the SCO. This meant expanding trade and investment, developing alternative transport corridors, and increasing the share of national currencies in mutual settlements. In 2022, the organization adopted a “Roadmap for the Gradual Increase in the Share of National Currencies in Mutual Settlements.”
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow had not shown comparable interest in strengthening the SCO’s economic component. One restraining factor was concern about the further strengthening of Chinese influence in the region. After 2022, by contrast, Russia began to advocate more actively for expanding the economic component of cooperation. The war also changed Moscow’s attitude toward China’s growing economic influence in Central Asia. Previous concerns about Beijing’s dominance receded into the background against the more urgent task of reducing dependence on Western financial infrastructure and mitigating the consequences of sanctions. Finally, Moscow sought Iran’s earliest possible accession to the SCO, its closest strategic partner in the Middle East. Russia viewed Iran and Belarus as reliable supporters of its interests and hoped that their membership would strengthen its influence within the SCO.
Iran’s accession process began as early as 2021, but at the 2022 summit in Samarkand Putin called for it to be accelerated: “Russia, no doubt, favors the earliest possible accession of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the SCO.” During the same period, Moscow intensified its efforts to integrate Belarus. Iran became a full member of the organization in 2023, and Belarus in 2024.
Belarus’s accession allowed Moscow to speak of expanding the SCO’s geographical reach into the European region. As Vladimir Putin emphasized, “Belarus by its scale, territory, economy and population is not comparable with China or India, but it is still an important element of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Because Belarus is already Eastern Europe. And this is already the SCO’s official access to the European continent.”
The expansion of geography and representation, however, did not change the balance of power within the organization. China retained its dominant position, India and Pakistan continued their rivalry, and the Central Asian states, with few exceptions, preferred after 2022 to distance themselves from Moscow’s sharpest statements.
What Russia Got from the SCO
Moscow’s main achievement lies in the diplomatic sphere. On September 1, another meeting of the organization’s heads of state took place in Bishkek—the fourth since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Each such summit gives Vladimir Putin the opportunity to present Russia’s position, voice grievances against Western countries, and simultaneously present Russia as the voice of the interests of the “Global Majority”—states that either support Moscow or, at the very least, have not joined efforts to isolate it internationally. The regularity of the summits and the diplomatic events accompanying them demonstrated in itself that US and EU sanctions had failed to sever Russia’s ties with its most important economic and political partners.
Moscow managed to secure the inclusion of anti-sanctions language in SCO documents. For example, the 2025 Tianjin Declaration stated that the organization’s members “oppose unilateral coercive measures, including those of an economic nature.” SCO declarations, of course, do not directly advance a pro-Russian agenda, but through their approval of economic, energy, and logistical cooperation plans they openly ignore the logic of “comprehensive sanctions.”
The full-scale war against Ukraine did not lead to Russia’s exclusion from any area of the organization’s activity. In this respect, the SCO differs from the BRICS New Development Bank, which formally froze Russia’s participation in new projects on March 4, 2022.
In 2025, the Russian side reported that, based on the results of 2024, Russia’s trade turnover with SCO countries exceeded $ 409 billion, while the share of national currencies in mutual settlements with the organization’s partners reached 97 percent. These figures may reflect the real scale of economic interaction, but the shift toward the use of national currencies should not be regarded as the result of the SCO’s own activity. The transition to such settlements accelerated primarily under the impact of Western sanctions and bilateral agreements between Russia and its key partners, above all China.
Overall, the SCO’s expansion strengthened Russia’s position through Belarus and Iran, but at the same time complicated the coordination of a common agenda within the organization. The enlarged BRICS faces a similar problem.
What Moscow Failed to Achieve
Russia failed to turn the SCO into a unified diplomatic bloc supporting its position on Ukraine. The organization’s largest members avoided rhetoric endorsing Moscow’s actions and demonstrated no willingness to support its territorial claims. Moreover, in 2026, partners’ dissatisfaction with the lack of progress in peace negotiations became increasingly open. A telling example is Vladimir Putin’s conversation with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the margins of the SCO summit in Bishkek.
India seeks to maintain a strategic balance, maintaining relations with Western countries and emphasizing that its foreign policy is not anti-Western. China, despite supporting many Russian theses about the transformation of the international order and criticizing Western sanctions, is not ready to become a direct party to Russia’s confrontation with the West. The Central Asian states, with the exception of Kyrgyzstan, also prefer cautious formulations regarding the war, while simultaneously helping Russia build alternative supply channels under sanctions restrictions. The only consistent form of collective behavior Moscow can count on within the SCO is abstention from voting for anti-Russian UN resolutions.
Moscow repeatedly tried to place the topic of a broader Eurasian security architecture on the SCO agenda. The Russian leadership sought to present the organization as a guarantor of “security and stability across the vast Eurasian space” and a fighter against “terrorism, extremism, drug trafficking, organized crime and illegal armed groups.” It was noted that the SCO’s work contributes to the formation of a new balanced security architecture in Eurasia.
At the same time, the SCO members themselves are unlikely to want to engage in building a common security architecture. The organization does not provide for mutual defense obligations or military assistance, and it contains no mechanisms for resolving disputes even between members of the grouping. The SCO’s existing security institutions are focused primarily on countering terrorism. The Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) plays a key role here.
Since 2022, the SCO has stopped holding the “Peace Mission” counter-terrorism exercises—large-scale command-and-staff events involving the deployment of troops, military equipment, headquarters, and weapons systems. The only remaining format is counter-terrorism exercises under the auspices of RATS, in which the special units and security services of member states participate. In scale and character, they are significantly inferior to “Peace Mission.”
The suspension of “Peace Mission” is telling: it indicates that even limited military cooperation within the SCO became politically more complicated after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The organization’s members are prepared to maintain interaction in the sphere of counter-terrorism, but they show no comparable interest in allowing the SCO to be associated with Russia’s security confrontation with the West. Moscow also failed to achieve significant progress on the creation of an SCO Development Bank. In theory, such an institution could perform tasks comparable to those of the BRICS New Development Bank, financing infrastructure and other projects in member states. Russia’s interest in this idea is directly linked to Western sanctions and the search for alternative financial infrastructure. In 2010, China had already proposed creating an SCO Development Bank, but for many years Russia opposed the initiative, fearing that the new institution would become an instrument for strengthening Chinese influence in Central Asia.
After 2022, Russian politicians and experts began actively supporting the creation of such a bank. At the most recent SCO summit, the idea received political support, but no concrete mechanisms for its implementation were proposed: there is still no clarity regarding the principles of governance of the future institution, its sources of funding, or the conditions for providing funds. The same fate befell other Russian initiatives: the creation of an SCO payment and settlement system, mutual recognition of credit ratings and commodity exchanges, and the issuance of joint bonds of the organization. None of this has been implemented.
Since 2022, Putin has repeatedly called to “expand trade and investment exchanges, carry out mutually beneficial business projects in various industries, and increase the volume of settlements in national currencies.” In practice, however, progress in these areas in Russia’s relations with SCO countries has occurred exclusively on a bilateral basis.
Russia’s initiatives to create a new financial infrastructure and form a pan-Eurasian security architecture are unlikely to receive significant development until SCO members see a threat to their own interests in existing international institutions, and cooperation with Moscow becomes less risky (the latter is possible only if sanctions are weakened or lifted). For the foreseeable future, the SCO will remain a flexible diplomatic platform whose members are prepared to cooperate where their interests coincide.
