Opinion Russia is struggling to annexe Ukraine, but China is annexing Russia pretty effortlessly
. Special operations are “conflicts which can be lost without a population really noticing. But when you lose a war you risk losing your country.”
And Russia’s economy is labouring under the heaviest sanctions it has faced since the Cold War. It has not collapsed in the way that some analysts predicted at the outset of the war in February, but the impact has been real, harmful and compounding.according to the IMFWhile the International Energy Agency forecast Moscow would suffer a loss of three million barrels of oil exports a day under the West’s sanctions, Russian oil has continued to sell well.
The outflow of Russian oil brings the renminbi inflow that keeps Putin’s regime afloat. This has allowed Putin to increase pensions and the minimum wage by 10 per cent, among other stimulatory state spending.In short, as Russia staggers, China is holding it up. Overall, total Russian exports to China have burgeoned by 49 per cent between January and July to $US61.4 billion.
Russia’s fiscal solvency now depends on a lifeline from China, an economy 10 times bigger than Russia’s. But for Beijing, trade with Russia is peripheral – amounting to just 2 per cent of China’s total trade with the world in 2021.