President Putin’s trip to the Vostotchny Cosmodrome, in the midst of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, shows Russia’s new priorities with its farewell to Europe. Putin, a man of cold blood and long political thought, leaves very little room for the chance of the moment. Politics is not about « everything at once », it is about choosing. He has chosen Asia for the future of Russia. Europe will lose its cheap energy resources and its already fragile competitiveness. It will find itself tied to the destiny of a declining North America. China and India, with the exploitation of Siberian resources, its black, blue and green gold, will be the big winners of this fracture, a real Russia-Europe tectonic rift. Perhaps it would have been better for Europe to depend on the energies of the Russian Arctic than on American shale gas, which is expensive and not very ecological, or on the energy resources of the Gulf States, which are uncertain in the long term.
FACTS
- On April 12, 2022, President Putin visited Blagovechtchensk, the administrative capital of the Amur Oblast. He was accompanied by A. Lukashenko* . He visited the Vostotchny cosmodrome, the Gazprom natural gas processing plant, the petrochemical complex of the Russian petrochemical giant Sibur (of which F. Fillon was a director) and various agricultural operations, in particular soybean production.
- 58 projects worth a total of RUR 432 billion* are underway in this region so close to China and so far from Europe. [•••]
Excerpt from the confidential letter Asie21-Futuribles n° 160/2022-04