Yekaterinburg, 2 June: The summit of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) which is to take place in Yekaterinburg in mid-June this year will make it into history, Vyacheslav Nikonov, president of the Politics Foundation and a member of the Russian Public Chamber, has said.

"The BRIC summit in Yekaterinburg will enable the 'group of four' to create institutions, to set up rudimentary bureaucracy. By doing this BRIC will turn into a formalized organization," he said at a round-table session entitled "Shanghai discourse: SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) in the modern civilization" that took place in Yekaterinburg on Tuesday (2 June).

Nikonov said that organizationally BRIC had not been established yet. The first formal meeting of the foreign ministers of the BRIC countries took place last year (2008) and again the venue was Yekaterinburg.

"Yekaterinburg is becoming the hometown of BRIC," Nikonov said.

In future, this organization will make it possible to create "a superpowerful structure which will be able to shape the face of the 21st century," Nikonov said.

The BRIC nations now occupy over 25 per cent of the planet's land surface and make up over 40 per cent of its population, while by the middle of the century "they might account for more than 50 per cent of the world's economy," he said.