In recent years, the United States and Europe began to actively use unfair competition by announcing all kinds of unilateral sanctions that violate international law in a frantic desire to achieve some advantage over Russia and China.
Washington and its Western allies will take any step they can come up with against China, only to worsen the situation in the Indo-Pacific by taking openly provocative actions. Primarily focusing on Taiwan, they create new alliances, including military ones, and the establishment of AUKUS in the Indo-Pacific is a vivid example of this. The course of confrontation with China taken in recent years by Washington is being pursued not only on the military-political and economic front but also by launching an information campaign criticizing alleged violations of human rights in the Xinjiang Uygur region, declaring China the number one enemy of the entire Western world. In recent months, Washington has tried to discredit the Winter Olympics in Beijing, due to take place in February 2022, by advising countries to join its diplomatic boycott, but to no avail.
No less aggressively, Washington and its Western allies are pursuing a sanctions policy against Russia, inventing and approving more and more anti-Russian sanctions for various far-fetched reasons. Recently, the European Union has become an active instrument in such a policy of Washington, introducing economic sanctions against Russia, prohibiting and restricting the activities of the Russian media, in particular, through the recent removal of the new German-language TV channel RT DE by the German media regulator MABB from the platform of the European satellite operator Eutelsat 9B.
By introducing and expanding various trade and economic restrictions against Russia, the European Union forced Moscow to actively engage in import substitution. The European economic sanctions have become more and more pointless. Realizing the failure of such a sanctions policy for the European economy, the current political establishment of the EU recently decided to demand from Russia 290 billion euros through the WTO for damage from the import substitution policy imposed by the EU. This policy has already disadvantaged European companies when trading with Russian state enterprises and other organizations.
In recent weeks, in its confrontation with Russia, accusations of the alleged danger of Moscow’s armed aggression against Ukraine is being artificially inflated. The groundlessness and artificial fiction of which Russian officials have repeatedly stated from various tribunes, the Biden administration is pushing European Union allies to finalize a broad package of sanctions against Russian banks and energy companies.
Another direction of confrontation with Russia adopted by Western Russophobes was accusations made by American and European experts that Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly uses the shortage of energy resources on the European market for malicious purposes. Due to this accusation, the official representatives of the USA and EU have threatened Russia with energy sanctions. At the same time, the United States especially insists on economic sanctions and the halt of the German-Russian project Nord Stream 2. Rejoicing, in particular, at the ill-conceived and openly running counter to the interests of Germany and the EU, the statements of the new Germany’s Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insists that this pipeline should not be operating. At the same time, European Russophobes do not even bother to listen to the official statements of the Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó and representatives of the European gas sector in Europe. And no one in the EU has encountered a violation of gas supply agreements by Russia’s Gazprom. Even Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, known for his anti-Russian stance, said that it is not Russia but the European Union responsible for the high prices for gas and energy in Europe in recent months.
In front of these political, economic and military insinuations from Washington and the EU towards Russia and China, Moscow and Beijing are increasingly building up bilateral cooperation. According to the recently published assessment by The Jerusalem Post it is one example of how Moscow and Beijing are increasingly coordinating their policies and forming an alliance. The goal is to create a multi-polar world and remove the vestiges of US hegemony. The fact that the failed sanctions policy of the United States and its European allies creates favorable conditions for cooperation between Russia and China is also reported by American media. At the same time, it is noted that since 1972 the West has had opportunities to prevent a rapprochement between the two countries, which are now considered a threat in the USA and the EU.
In the context of the indicated provocative actions of the West, including those aimed at energy cooperation between Russia and the EU, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to increase gas supplies to China, which was especially noted by European media. In particular, the upcoming Sino-Russian deal on constructing a new pipeline between Russia and China provides for an additional supply of Russian gas to the Celestial Empire, equivalent to the volumes of fuel planned to be sent to the European Union via Nord Stream 2. This agreement will double exports to China, annually transporting up to 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas through the new major gas pipeline Power of Siberia 2. At the same time, Europe especially notes that this is happening when the rest of Europe is experiencing a severe energy crisis. And Bloomberg directly writes that Europe runs the risk of being left without gas in the next two months due to freezing weather and low reserves of blue fuel in storage.
At the same time, Europe clearly realizes that one should not expect the United States to help the EU with its liquefied natural gas. In Washington, they say that the market decides everything, and they cannot tell companies to whom to sell their energy resources. And since Asia can start paying more for them at any time, tankers with American LNG can again reorient their routes and begin delivering gas to Japan, Taiwan or South Korea, and not to Europe.
Vladimir Odintsov, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
