My Twitter feed frequently shows me stories about how the Russo-Ukrainian War has devastated the Russian economy and how Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has led the country down the toilet. But, alas!, it seems that maybe, just maybe, things haven’t gone quite as we’ve been told. From The New York Times: There’s a lot more at the original, but, put basically,
Russia has found new routes of trade, including through Turkey, a NATO member nation, to make up for those cut off by Western economic sanctions. It should have been obvious: with Communist China as an ally, Russia was never going to be hit as hard as Western economic projections had guesstimated, and it’s pretty difficult to restrict technology as long as Communist China is there.
FESCO, the Russian Far East Shipping Company, added a new FESCO Turkey Black Sea Service on the Novorossiysk – Istanbul – Gebze – Novorossiysk route in April of 2022, as the Western sanctions were starting to take hold. Many consumer goods imports by Russia fell following the post-invasion sanctions, but Western brands which were restricted have been replaced by Chinese goods.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves: just because the Western nations have decided that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is horrible does not mean that nations outside of Western culture have just gone along with that. Communist China, for one, has a vested interest in seeing the West waste money and military equipment sending aid to Ukraine, to see it get expended on the Ukrainian battlefields, and if Xi Jinping isn’t all that interested in seeing Russia grow stronger, seeing the West get weaker certainly brings a smile to his face.
Communist China’s only real worry? That Russia will up the ante by using a couple of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons against Ukrainian positions and supply and transfer depots for Western military hardware. Crossing the nuclear threshold would have Western leaders defecating in their pants, which both Russia and Communist China know and would love to see, but there’s no guarantee that a limited use of nuclear weapons would stay limited.
The war has gone on for eleven months now, and if there will be no real winner between Russia and Ukraine — Russia will continue to see serious sanctions and have a huge loss of military prestige, while Ukraine, even if it somehow ‘wins,’ has been devastated — Communist China has already won. And the longer the war continues, the bigger Communist China’s win will become.
