Either this was a brilliant hack on the part of Ukraine, or someone in the Russian Embassy in South Africa is in seriously deep doo-doo. This map released to ostensibly “celebrate” the hoped-for enlargement of the BRICS grouping of Global South nations as a counterweight to the G-7 contains a really glaring error, at least from a Russian perspective. Look closely at the outline of Ukraine — not only is all of Eastern Ukraine shown as still belonging to Ukraine, including those areas still occupied by Russian troops, but so is Crimea, which they illegally annexed back in 2014!
As reported by Ukrainska Pravda today, and picked up by Newsweek:
Source: Russia in South Africa on the X (Twitter) social media platform
Details: On 28 August, the Russian embassy in South Africa tweeted a map of the countries that may become the members of BRICS in 2024, and on this map, Crimea is shown as a territory of Ukraine and does not turn green like the Russian Federation.
"Reality of a new multipolar world," this is how the Russian embassy captioned their dream about extending the BRICS group.
Needless to say, this X/tweet was quickly deleted when the “error” was discovered, but nothing that shows up on social media ever really disappears down the memory hole. Slava Ukraini!