An important energy supplier to China, Russia has strengthened trade ties with Beijing over the past decade. However, Russia’s economic weight
pales in comparison to Western nations, which are much bigger export customers for China, major sources of technology and investment, and also control China’s access to the international dollar system.
China’s Dilemma Is How to Aid Russia When West Matters More (yahoo.com)
Kazakhstan to Putin:
Pound sandKazakhstan, is one of Russia’s closest allies and a southern neighbor.
Vladimir Putin’s miscalculations in Ukraine have multiplied in the last two days. In the first place, the Russian army appears to be struggling to overcome the unexpectedly fierce resistance from fully mobilized Ukrainians, despite massive numerical and technological advantages.
At the same time, allies whom Putin assiduously courted over the last several years have done an abrupt about-face, blasting Putin publicly over his naked aggression in Europe.
None of these backfires is more surprising than in Kazakhstan. Putin just got done rescuing President Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev from a serious uprising six weeks ago, sending Russian army formations to put down demonstrators in Almaty. With his invasion bogging down, Putin asked
Tokayev for more troops to support the Ukraine invasion.
Not only did Tokayev refuse, but he also went further in refusing to recognize the “independent” states Putin set up in the Donbas: That’s a stunning flip for Tokayev and a real problem for Putin on an entirely different front. Kazakhstan is a strategically for Putin in Central Asia; its size and position allow Putin to flex his muscle from China to Iran and Pakistan. If the invasion of Ukraine has forced the scales to fall from Tokayev’s eyes about Putin’s ambitions for former Soviet republics, Putin’s reach and influence just took a very large hit in an area that might matter to him more than his western frontier, strategically speaking. And it’s tough to imagine that Tokayev fails to recognize the threat that Putin represents to those former Soviet republics, even with Putin’s rescue last month.
Nor is Tokayev the only friendly country that Putin has alienated with this move. Hungary and Czech Republic leaders had been sympathetic to Putin and growing more restive within the EU, offering Putin a chance to split the Western alliance. Those efforts also came to an abrupt halt yesterday:
Until now major pro-Russian voices in the European Union, Czech President Milos Zeman, and Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban
didn’t mince their words in criticizing Moscow’s most aggressive action since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Zeman called Thursday’s invasion “an unprovoked act of aggression.” …
Until just days ago, Zeman was insisting that the Russians wouldn’t attack Ukraine because “they aren’t lunatics to launch an operation that would be more damaging for them than beneficial.”. “I admit I was wrong,” he said Thursday.
Hungary has historically deeply distrusted Moscow, which ordered the brutal repression of an anti-Soviet uprising in 1956. But Orban in recent years has pursued a diplomatic and economic strategy he calls “Eastern Opening,” which favors closer ties with countries to the east, and in his frequent battles with the EU has called the 27-nation bloc an oppressive imperial power similar to Hungary’s former Soviet occupiers.“
Russia attacked Ukraine this morning with military force,” Orban said in a video on Facebook. “Together with our European Union and NATO allies, we condemn Russia’s military action. ” Hungary’s position is clear: we stand by Ukraine, we stand by Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” his Foreign Minister Peter Szijijarto said.
Orban was no less direct, and Bulgaria and Romania followed suit:
Romania has opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees and has eliminated all of the red tapes of processing to keep them safe. Moldova has done the same, despite its former friendliness to Moscow and the dangerous position in which Putin’s invasion obviously places them.
It’s so bad, in fact, that Putin’s propaganda outlets in the West appear to be running out of useful fools:
All of this prompts a question of whether Putin can outlast Volodymyr Zelensky rather than the other way around. If his military gets humiliated any further, the threats to NATO are going to look entirely delusional, putting Russian security at a decades-long low. How long will the Russian oligarchs stand for that kind of isolation, embarrassment, and oppression? Scales should be falling from eyes in Moscow, too.
Kazakhstan to Putin: Pound sand – HotAir
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2022/01/06/dont-look-now-but-russian-troops-just-intervened-in-another-former-soviet-r
