The other thing that is playing in the background but was not mentioned in the article is that Xi thinks longer term. He will want China to take advantage of Ukraine's economically busted down state after the war and get in on the rebuilding of Ukraine- allegedly under the guise of being humanitarian and all of that. Maybe rebuild the steel mills at Mariupol. Yeh. that would work fine. So Xi is not interested in all the dark, ugly, genocide, and demonizing of the Ukranians. That's bad for business. I mean, he does plenty of it and runs a full set of concentration camps himself but he keeps that as low key as he can and pretty much gets away with it. Putin is sort of a nightmare for Xi. He wanted Putin to be the model of how a country can reclaim what it alleges is a historical part of its country and people, and have a tidy little 3-day invasion and then everyone is back to normal again six months later. Because that is what he wants to do in Taiwan. Instead, Putin has offered him up an example of the worst case scenario and given the game of reclaiming and allegedly re-uniting separated peoples a bad name. Xi is not interested in acquiring Taiwan with most of the cities looking like a parking lot in New Jersey, per the Putin model.
Oh jeez. Already, already a nightmare. Putin set out with all these Russian World themes that he was promoting and that he would be the next Peter the Great. Now he is somewhere between the village idiot and Ivan the Terrible and he has made Russia a vassal state of China. We know who the junior partner is in that relationship with China.
Ukrainian War Costing Russia A Billion US Dollars A Day, Driving Ever More Russians Into Poverty https://www.eurasiareview.com/14092...driving-ever-more-russians-into-poverty-oped/
Russian economy beginning to look a little less surplussy these days. Russia’s budget surplus all but disappeared over the summer, according to data published by the Russian finance ministry this week. At the end of June, the surplus stood at 1.37 trillion rubles ($23 billion); by the end of August it had fallen to just 137 billion ($2.3 billion.) https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/15/economy/russia-economy-budget-hole/index.html
Great idea, Vlad!! What could go wrong there? You a genius. Russia Tells Pilots To Repair Their Own Planes Amid Sanctions—Report Pilots of regional Russian airlines will be instructed to carry out maintenance on their own aircraft, amid sanctions imposed on the country following its invasion of Ukraine. The comments came from Oleg Bocharov, Russia's deputy minister of Industry and Trade, speaking earlier this month at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. During an address on "Air transport accessibility of the Far East in conditions of turbulence," he said: "Together with the Ministry of Transport, we must train and certify pilots as universal fighters: they must simultaneously be pilots and aircraft technicians. And the equipment should provide for the possibility of field repairs in operation. "We are talking about pilots, primarily of regional aviation, for which a fundamentally new system for maintaining the airworthiness of new types of domestic regional aircraft should be created." https://www.newsweek.com/russia-pilots-repair-planes-sanctions-ukraine-war-report-1743217
Russian economy won’t recover from Ukraine war ‘until 2030s’ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/retail-sales-slump-1-6pc-063626036.html
Swoosh Ukraine's Zelenskiy thanks Nike for leaving Russia market https://www.reuters.com/business/re...thanks-nike-leaving-russia-market-2022-09-16/
Russia's isolation from global markets is withering its economy and will wreck its status as an energy superpower, experts say https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mar...-an-energy-superpower-experts-say/ar-AA11X4yg