The war in Ukraine has a victor: China is the hegemon of a new Eastern bloc. From Belarus to North Korea, exchanges are flourishing – with weapons, industrial goods and ideology against the West.
In November 2022, Denis Manturov made a special trip to a desolate suburb in the southeast of Moscow. In Tekstilshchiki, the Russian deputy prime minister said he wanted to celebrate an “event of national importance”: the birth of the Moskvich 3. According to Vladimir Putin’s wishes, 100,000 “patriotic” cars should soon roll off the assembly line at the former factory of the French Renault group .
A year later, in November 2023, Manturow barely reported the production of a good 10,000 vehicles. In his opinion, enough to revive the Moskvich brand, which ended up on the dustbin of automotive history in 2006 after the bankruptcy of its Russian manufacturer. Now it is intended to tickle Russian national pride and, above all, to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of all Western sanctions.
The fact that the small, box-shaped SUV with 150 hp consists entirely of components from the Chinese manufacturer JAC is no longer a problem. “Only the emblem” is Russian, even the Moscow specialist media “Awto” joked. Manturov, however, today celebrates the project as a “model for Russian-Chinese cooperation.”
In fact, the same pattern can now be observed everywhere in Russian industry: Western companies like Renault and VW are moving away, Chinese companies like JAC are moving into the abandoned factories. In return, Russia is supplying more and more energy raw materials to China. Trade is booming. And around the “iron axis” of the two countries, as the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” recently said, rogue states such as Belarus, Iran, Syria and the hitherto completely ostracized North Korea are increasingly grouping themselves.
Alliance around China and Russia: Belarus is the best example
Initially it was all about circumventing Western sanctions, supplying arms and buying oil and gas cheaply. But now the flow of goods and the nations involved are solidifying, the common denominator of which is hostility towards the USA and all Western values. They are becoming more and more closely coordinated economically. Something like a new Eastern bloc is emerging. And as in the old socialist camp that collapsed in 1989, the leading power – then the Soviet Union, now China – is turning all the countries connected to it into mere satellites.
Source: Stern
