By Thierry Thodinor
To appreciate St Petersburg – the city of my heart – you’d better not be allergic to Tchaikovsky or sailing marine. Vladivostock requires you to raise your heartbeat to the level of a Ramones concert and be prepared to board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
What is being built there is the new Rome of the Asia-Pacific, nothing less than the European capital of the Far East.
At a time when neocon ‘strategists’ are drawing with their crooked fingers the little maps of the dismantled Russia of their dreams, the real Russia is inventing a destiny for itself in the East, as if to mock them.
Faced with the dying powers of „globalism among friends“ (the United States and its festering European „garden“), it is completing its Asian pivot. For the record, this geopolitical epiphany took placeat the eighth edition of the Forum of the Russian East held in Vladivostok from 10 to 13 September 2023.
It and was, of course, deliberately ignored by the Western press.
„Moscow looks east and south“
Since its foundation as a naval base in 1859, Vladivostok, bathed by the Sea of Japan, has projected Russia into the Asia-Pacific region. Today, it is becoming the scene of a civilisational upheaval. „Moscow is looking east and south“, Vladimir Putin declared in his speech at the Far Eastern Federal University on 12 September. The development of the Russian Far East just raised to Russia’s national strategic priority for the 21st century. The West, with its lying mouth, has „destroyed with its own hands the commercial and financial system that it itself created“ (V. Putin’s speech again) and has managed to unite against it a Eurasian coalition that inspires almost all the countries of the „Global South“. As a sovereign state, Russia is inviting the „Global South“ to cooperate with it so that they can determine their own future independently. From the Arab world to South-East Asia, the message has been heard.
In the space of barely two months, Russian diplomacy has laid the foundations for a new nomos of the world: the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg at the end of July, the BRICS summit in Johannesburg at the end of August and today the Russian Far East Economic Forum in Vladivostok.
Here, 8 time zones away from the Ukrainian theatre of operations, it is economic warfare that is at the heart of the debates and, here again, the Eurasian frenzy of innovation contrasts with the conceptual and operational stagnation of the European elites.
The challenge to American unipolarity revolves around three main axes:
- The Russian Far East as the European keystone of the Asia-Pacific region
- New logistics routes: Northern Sea Route and INSTC
- De-dollarization and overhaul of payment systems
The Russian Far East
The Russian Far East is Russia’s largest federal district in terms of size. The figures are staggering:
– The Russian Far East economic region covers 41% of the total surface area of the Russian Federation
– Its resources (98% of Russian diamond production, 75% of known oil reserves and 90% of gas reserves in the Arctic alone, 80% of tin, 50% of gold, 40% of fish and seafood, 33% of coal reserves, 30% of Russia’s total forest area, etc.), which are numerous but unexploited, still only contribute 5% to Russian GDP. What’s more, only 35% of Russia’s Far East has been explored. The potential for development seems infinite.
– Its geographical location: access to two oceans (Pacific and Arctic), shared borders with five countries (China, North Korea, Mongolia, the United States and Japan), spread over four time zones and different climatic zones, ranging from Arctic deserts to subtropical zones.
– Its foreign trade grew by 14% in freight terms and 11% in monetary terms in the first eight months of 2023.
– Its investment rate is three times the national average.
– Its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production in the Russian Arctic is set to triple by 2030. There are also plans to connect the Siberian gas pipelines to the integrated national supply system, as the challenge is also to develop domestic industrial consumption.
New routes
Two major international connectivity routes for Russia: the Northern Sea Route, which runs from the Barents Sea, near Russia’s border with Norway, to the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, and the 7,000km-long International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which will link St Petersburg to Bombay, via Iran and the Caspian Sea region. In July, Turkmenistan joined the project, and the Russia-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran branch of the corridor will be completed in 2027.
Saudi Arabia recently used the INSTC for the first time to trade with Russia, while last week Gazprom delivered LNG from its own production for the first time along the Northern Sea Route, demonstrating the feasibility of the Northern Sea Route as an alternative to the Suez Canal route. Faster and beyond Washington’s control.
New-generation icebreakers, the doubling of Arctic port capacity by 2030 and the construction of a floating gas liquefaction facility (the world’s largest floating platform ever constructed) contribute to the development of the Northern Sea Route. Russia’s gas pivot towards Asia is clearly underway.
A new Russia-China overland grain corridor will support China’s food security strategy. Indeed, China, home to a fifth of the world’s population, has just 7% of the planet’s arable land.
Finance
The reserve currencies (the US dollar, the euro and the pound sterling) have become toxic for nations because they are repeatedly militarized by the collective West. De-dollarization is not a whim, but a matter of survival. The world is already rejecting the dollar as a reserve currency, and everyone understands that international prices must no longer be set by Western speculators. Already, the share of national currencies in Russian-Chinese payments was 80% last year, compared with just 25% the previous year; in the very short term, trade between Russia and China will be 100% in national currencies already
One estimates that 83% of Intra-Eurasian trade is conducted in national currencies.
Building a monetary system takes time, and some countries cannot break their dependence on toxic currencies overnight. India does not use the yuan, Russia is not interested in building up reserves in rupees, Kazakhstan remains tied to toxic currencies and China has neither the ambition nor the capacity to replace the dollar. The digitalization of currencies makes it possible to short-circuit the laborious and unrealistic construction of a common currency on a Eurasian scale. A Eurasian payment system could therefore rapidly emerge, based on a blockchain platform. The digital ruble is becoming a necessity.
– Infrastructure before the single currency: in the Greater Asia + Russia perspective, massive investment in infrastructure is a burning obligation. Roads and new connectivity routes (as an example, Vladivostok and Beijing, although close, are poorly linked) are necessary, as part of a policy of small steps policy before thinking about a common currency. However, Moscow and Beijing need to create a shared financial infrastructure that would enable them to operate independently of the Western-dominated financial institutions (IMF and World Bank). The New Development Bank is here to help.
A combat forum
– Smart cities and business models based on digitisation and Big Data were also discussed at the forum. Russia doesn’t want to clone the West, but it must tame technoscience to win the multipolarity war
– In total, investment agreements worth more than 7.7 trillion roubles ($81.1 billion) Vladimir Putin told the Eastern Economic Forum.
– Kim Jong-un’s surprise visit at the end of the forum rounded off the Greater Integrated Asia process. It leaves the local vassal states (Japan and South Korea) of the United States as peripheral rump states.
Russia’s Asian pivot is here to stay. From Dublin to Lampedusa, from Melilla to Warsaw, the decent European man has Russia to thank for exporting Europe to the Far East… His very own job will be to clean out the Western stables as quickly as possible.