Interview with Xavier Moreau
Vladivostok September, 2023
Xavier Moreau is a French businessman and political-strategic analyst based in Moscow. A Saint-Cyrien and graduate of the Sorbonne (Paris IV) in the history of international relations, he runs the geopolitical analysis website Stratpol.
T T: We’re eight time zones away from the Ukrainian theater of operations, and the main issue here is economic warfare, which is also total in itself. Has the Russian economy been destroyed, as Bruno Lemaire announced with a clarion call?
X M: I do believe that NATO’s war against Russia is first and foremost an economic war. I don’t think anyone has ever seriously thought that a military victory by Ukraine, or even NATO, on Russian soil was feasable. We mustn’t confuse the experts on TV with those who actually run the operations!
General Milley, the US Chief of Staff, does not believe it is possible to defeat Russia militarily. The plan has always been to bring it down economically through sanctions. Instead, as in 2014-2015, Russia is taking advantage of these sanctions to make a qualitative leap; it has entered, as I analyze in a forthcoming book, a phase of hyper-industrialization. Russia is becoming a country of engineers and high technology. Companies, notably Rostech, the civil-military technology giant, are building universities to train the specialists they need.
T T: The Russian Far East economic region represents more than a third of the Russian Federation’s surface area, but only 8 million inhabitants and 5% of Russian GDP. There is therefore enormous room for manoeuvre, and Vladimir Putin has made the development of the Russian Far East the strategic challenge for Russia in the 21st century. Where should we start?
X M: We need to colonize these unpopulated lands. I’ve just been talking to Alexei Chekunkov, the minister in charge of economic development in the Arctic and Far East, who plans to make these territories more attractive by creating 22 to 25 ultra-modern urban hubs, and providing additional support for large families on top of federal aid. Attracting and training people is a priority, and the results have already been seen, with Vladivostok boasting one of the largest and most beautiful campuses in the Far East, and a magnet for Russia’s young population.
For us Europeans, it’s comforting to find a vibrant Europe on the shores of the Sea of Japan. Vladivostok is Asia’s first major European city!
T T: Questions of infrastructure and logistics routes often come up in discussions. One topic is the Northern Sea Route (Arctic)…
X M: From East to West and from West to East, there are two main axes:
– an overland axis (the Silk Roads, i.e. China’s One Road One Belt project), which will create an eco-system around the road axis, passing through Russia and/or Kazakhstan, but also Iran and Saudi Arabia, which China has managed to reconcile around this project.
– a northern maritime axis, an alternative route to the Suez Canal and the oceans controlled by the American hegemon.
Thanks to global warming and new generations of Russian atomic icebreakers, this route connects Rotterdam to China all year round.
It is via this route that Europeans receive liquefied natural gas (LNG) delivered by tanker from the Russian Arctic, at a price four to five times higher than that of gas that was formerly delivered via pipelines!
Through the Arctic, Russia can cover Europe (and Asia for that matter) much more quickly than via the Suez Canal or Cape Town.
In addition to these East-West routes, agreements have been signed for a new North-South Volga-Caspian route – multimodal and also avoiding the Suez Canal – which, passing through Iran, will connect Saint Petersburg to Bombey (International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC)).
T T: Another important aspect is monetary and financial cooperation within the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, against a backdrop of de-dollarization of trade relations. How far along are the Eurasian payment system projects?
X M: We’re not starting from scratch: the Chinese payment system (CIPS) and the Russian payment system (SPFS) are functional equivalents of SWIFT. But India doesn’t want to trade with a Chinese system. The ideal would be to create a BRICS currency, which would be a balanced basket of currencies. In the meantime, non-dollar trade is becoming commonplace within the framework of bilateral exchanges. In particular, last year, 80% of trade between China and Russia was conducted in rubles or yuan, compared with just 25% the previous year. In the very short term, Sino-Russian trade will be 100% in national currencies. However, the South African rand and the Indian rupee are of less interest to Russia, not least because the level of trade with these countries is lower. Blockchain and decentralized crypto-currencies also open up prospects for freeing up payments; they began to be actively used even before the start of the special operation.
T T: After a historic sequence that, in just two months, has seen a Russia-Africa summit, a BRICS summit and now the Eastern Economic Forum, how far has the world tilted?
X M: The Vladivostok forum goes indeed far beyond a question of regional development: Russia has a front-row seat to a radical geo-economic paradigm shift, and is more than ever Europe’s gateway to Asia. Western Europeans are unfortunately missing the boat in this shift of the world economy towards Asia. They should be there to develop transfer routes, new ports, etc., but the European states are Washington’s slave states.
The world has turned upside down, and this is the moment that European society has chosen to close itself off by becoming a third-world subcontinent, while Russian society is opening up while asserting its identity!
Vladivostok became the European capital of Asia!
Europe is ruined and has only its dubious morals to offer the rest of the world. Africa rejects it and turns to India, China and Russia, who don’t teach them lessons.
T T: Is Russia’s Asian pivot definitive?
X M: Yes. The Western signature is worthless: the episodes of the cancelled Mistral sale, the crisis exit agreements at the time of the Maïdan that did not last 24 hours, and the Minsk agreements destined to fail, as Angela Merkel and François Hollande have acknowledged…Add to this the boundless submission of Europeans to the will of Washington, and it’s clear that the resumption of simple good-neighborly relations with Russia is not in the offing.