Huge military maneuvers between Russia and China will start today. The Ukraine war welded the two giant empires together. The result of this liaison is impressive – and also frightening.
Great and proud Russia has a problem from birth: it cannot live alone. It has too many borders, too many enemies, and too many resources for it to live a life of splendid isolation.
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That is why the creation of the Soviet Union – i.e. the reassembly of the collapsed Russian Empire in 1922 – was a liberating blow. But only with the Warsaw Pact founded in 1955 – the merger of the Soviet Union with the Eastern European spoils of war from Yalta – did an effective security structure emerge around Moscow.
The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance – the economic counterpart to the Warsaw Pact – finally created an Eastern European internal market, which ensured stable customer relationships in the Russian energy business. Gazprom provided gas, communist ideology provided the icing.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin had to go looking for a partner. Russia suffered from strategic loneliness.
The icing had melted, the Eastern European brothers-in-arms had slipped west and new buyers for the gas had to be found.
On September 25, 2001, Putin also stopped by Berlin, where he addressed the members of the Bundestag, which could also be understood as an acquisition conversation.
“No one doubts the great value of Europe’s relationship with the United States. But I believe that Europe will only strengthen its reputation as a powerful and independent center of world politics in the long term if it matches its own potential with Russia’s resources, human, territorial and natural resources, as well as with Russia’s economic, cultural and defense potential will unite. “
But nothing came of this union. Russia and Europe did not find each other militarily and economically. Russia remained lonely. The partner search had to go on.
Putin subsequently tied up with China . But only the attack on Ukraine welded the two neighboring states together politically, militarily and increasingly economically. The new European-Asian formation – let’s call it the Putin/Xi Pact – is much more robust than many other alliances in world history:
And the frosting of an ideologized language is back, as the Chinese Communist Party-dominated newspaper “Global Times” proved yesterday: “Despite the West’s increasingly harsh subversive measures against Sino-Russian relations, the two countries have strengthened their relations. “
And indeed, the balance sheet of the Putin-Xi pact is impressive – or, depending on your point of view, also frightening:
Conclusion: The self-therapy of the Russians continues. With the attack on Ukraine, Putin is fighting his imperial inferiority complex, and his strategic loneliness in his liaison with the Chinese. A Soviet Union Superior is emerging before our eyes.
