Quis Prodest?
Europe will have to readjust its fuel market to account for no longer having Russia as a supplier (which the US could offset if that stupid sonofabitch Biden hadn't torpedoed the US's oil industry).
Southeast Asia will have to adjust to a world in which the US is too focused on Russia to do anything to protect them from China.
Indeed, the only winners I see here, will be Joe Biden, and his Chinese master, Xi Jinping.
-This author, on 7 March, 2002
Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine brought a full-scale war to European soil for the first time since WW2. Russia's genocidal operation has displaced 7 million civilians in 115 days (BBC Staff (1)), a number rapidly approaching the 9.2 million displaced in Iraq in the past 19 years combined (Watson Institute). It is difficult to know how many civilians have been killed, as the invading horde doesn't allow international humanitarian authorities into the cities they have pillaged, but it is estimated that the death toll in Mariupol alone was 21,000 civilians (Reuters Staff), a number which the UN has not been able to confirm yet because the occupation forces are not allowing anyone to check the bodies of the mass graves there.
Well unsurprisingly, the invasion has brought international damnation of Russia, with 141 countries backing a UN resolution condemning it (UN News). Yes, of course, there is the occasional apologist for Russia, from bleeding-hearts who say the Russian population are "hostages" to Putin, to the Far-Right who buy Russia's moronic rhetoric of "defending themselves" from imagined "Nazis." There are, too, the usual conspiracy theorists who have no worldview other than "Hmmm... most of the world wants me to stand with Ukraine, and since the majority wants it, there must be some eeeeeeevil shadowy plot afoot that means I should oppose it," along with the predictable "if the West is for Ukraine then I must be for Russia just because... well, reasons, you know?" But for the most part, the world has been pretty unified in recognizing that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was an outdated throwback to 19th century imperialism.
What remains to be asked though is, "why?" What did Russia hope to gain from this? From the beginning it was obvious that Russia could not hope to benefit from this invasion (Yilmaz). Indeed, the obviousness of this was the principal fact I cited in my doubts that such an invasion would occur. Russia has not benefited at all from their invasion and they only stand to be further weakened. So what was its purpose?
With each passing day, it is more and more apparent that the answer is "somebody did stand to gain, and it wasn't Russia." And to see who that "somebody" is, we need only look East.
China's "Borrowed Sword"
For years, China has played a diplomatic game with the West. When the West put pressure on China, China responded by getting a vassal state to put pressure on the West. The usual choice was North Korea (Friedman). Then China would tell the West "I'll make a deal with you. Relax the pressure on us and we'll 'help you' with that situation." It was usually obvious that the "situation" in question was of China's own making, but since that couldn't be proven, the West would look like bullies if they called China's vassal state's actions a provocation by China and retaliated. In this way, China has played "good cop bad cop" against the West, always using a vassal state as the bad cop for diplomatic plausible deniability.
However, the Trump/Kim summit in Singapore showed China that the US is capable (at least under more savvy leadership than what we have now) of taking China's vassal states out from under their control. Though China did eventually reassert their dominion over North Korea as Biden's aimless foreign policy removed the wedge Trump drove between the sovereign in Beijing and the vassal in Pyongyang (Lee), the Zhongnanhai Crime Syndicate was still shaken up enough to see that they needed to find another vassal state (in case they ever lost their hold over North Korea again) to take North Korea's former place: a loud, snarling, not-overly-intelligent attack dog with which to harass the West.
And they found a new dog. It's name is Russia.
Reality Check: China Knew
There is, at this point, no way to deny that Putin made Xi Jinping aware of his intentions to invade Ukraine. Early in February, Putin became the only major world leader to attend the 2022 Winter Cov-lympic Games (Johnson). There, he and Xi released an in-your-face joint statement to the world. In this statement, both countries declared Ukraine should not be allowed to join NATO (Munroe, Osborn & Pamuk)(1), but the phrasing went on to be more blatant.
Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no 'forbidden' areas of cooperation.
And less than three weeks after this statement was made, Russia launched an invasion they could not hope to succeed in without Chinese help. Senior Biden Administration officials say they have valid intel saying China knew about the invasion (Wong, Barnes), and asked Russia to delay it until after Olympics so it would not distract the world media from the spectacle China was trying to put on.
It is said that this report may also have included another bombshell: namely, the revelation that water is, in fact, wet.
Of course, a few Sinophiles have tried to claim this is false, and their evidence largely consists of "China did not know, because China tells us they did not know, and of course China would NEVER lie, right?" (Sun) (2), but most of the world agrees China had foreknowledge.
Which makes me wonder how to you say "No Shit, Sherlock!" in Mandarin or Russian.
But I'm thinking actually, it was more than foreknowledge. I am convinced that China not only knew about Russia's plans to invade Ukraine, but goaded them into it and selected the timing.
非常方便，你同意吗? Да, Действительно Очень Удобно
The elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about is that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was the most fortuitous thing to happen to China in a long, LONG time. For one thing, it gave the world a bogeyman to hate other than China, who has been the world's whipping boy (Silver, Devlin & Huang) since they unleashed a pandemic in 2019/2020. But more importantly, it has had two major effects. For one thing, as Western sanctions gut Russia's oil export industry, a desperate Russian government has had nowhere to turn to other than China, who is purchasing oil from them at a phenomenally discounted rate (Chen & Tan). What nobody noticed was that the same was true of coal. As part of these sanctions, the EU, which had formerly been one of Russia's two largest markets for coal, announced sweeping sanctions on its import from Russia (Villa & Holman). As the EU sanctioned Russian coal, Russia's economy took a massive blow (Abrossimov). And China did to Russia's suddenly-discounted coal what they did to its suddenly-discounted oil: devoured it (Tan). Given the discounted rate, this was not enough to completely mitigate the damage done to Russia's revenues by the loss of the EU market, but Russia is in a position to take whatever they can get (He).
...And my, what "Manna from Heaven" this was for China, which is suffering energy shortages (Vashistha) ever since banning the import of Australian coal as part of a tantrum about Australia having the unmitigated audacity to say Beijing should be investigated for the virus they released (Choudhury), to suddenly have an abundance of oil available for purchase at pennies on the usual dollar, from a now-broken, desperate vassal state.
The other major impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, was what Ukraine is famous for: grain. So much has been said of the impending famine from the grain shortage caused by Russia's blockade of Ukrainian ports (khatiri), peppering their fields with landmines (MacDonald) and outright bombing their food production system (Welsh et. al) that it scarcely bears repeating. What is forgotten amid this talk of grain shortages is something that was all the buzz less than a year ago: China, in response to a catastrophic food security crisis beginning in 2019, has been hoarding grain for several years, and has now stockpiled more than half the world's existing supply (Watanabe & Munakata).
In other words, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has caused a pitfall in the price of a commodity China badly needs while leaving a major supplier of that commodity with no market other than China, has caused a global shortage of a commodity China has been stockpiling for 3 years while globally isolating one of that commodity's two biggest suppliers and devastating the other, AND has relieved China of their status as the most scorned and reviled nation on Earth by making people so preoccupied with Russia's crimes that we have now forgotten theirs.
That's a hell of a lot of smoke for there not to be a fire somewhere!
But it begs the question, did China engineer this, or merely stumble into it? To answer that, we need to look at the calendar.
Timing
Let's begin with the order of events. The earliest article I can find mentioning China's energy crisis was 27 Sep, 2021 (BBC Staff (2)). Then, the earliest article I can find wherein the West took note of Russia's troop buildup near Ukraine was 14 April, 2021 (Smith & Bodner), less than a month after a supposedly "spontaneous" meeting between Sergei Lavrov and Wang Yi (and the stench of bullshit when those two both spoke on the same stage must have been overpowering). The tone of the meeting was rather glaringly "how dare the US accuse us of anything," and ended with a juvenile tantrum of allegations which cannot help but make a Ukrainian or Taiwanese laugh uproariously at the irony.
The two sides, both under a spate of fresh sanctions by the United States and European countries over human rights violations, called for a United Nations Security Council summit over what they see as intensified turbulent change, bullying, and meddling in domestic affairs. “Interference in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs under the excuse of ‘advancing democracy’ is unacceptable,” the two said in a joint statement.
-Eleanor Albert, The Diplomat
The timing of this meeting, coming shortly after the Anchorage summit (which ended with China feeling that they were on the backfoot (Tiezzi), makes it look like China was saying "alright, the US won't cut us any slack so it's time to unleash the hound." And of course, they made no secret of the context.
Sino-Russian cooperation appears poised to expand further as officials continue to present the friendship as ever-stronger and closer. Russia was reportedly the most visited country by high-level Chinese delegations in 2020 despite the global pandemic, with Wang and Lavrov having eight phone calls and two meetings last year.
It is a foregone conclusion that those calls included Wang trying to twist Lavrov's arm to get him to focus more on China and less on Europe as a market for Russian coal, considering China's ongoing energy crisis. It is also worth noting that both the initial Russian troop buildup in 2021 and the invasion in 2022 happened immediately after high-level face-to-face meetings between Russian leaders and their Chinese counterparts (Lavrov and Yi in 2021, Putin and Xi in 2022). There is no plausible deniability here for China. They knew Russia was going to invade Ukraine. The next question then becomes "did they know what the result would be?"
The answer is, "they'd have to have been fools not to." In the days leading up to the invasion, the entire world was awash with articles speculating what sort of sanctions the West would hit Putin with, and the general consensus was that Putin had been thinking the same thing and was prepared. I'm going to breach normal academic protocol for a moment and not cite ALL such sources I found because there are so damned many but I'll link them here, here, and here for starters. Now, if the West and Russia both roughly knew that the energy sanctions on Russia (from which China benefited so immensely) would be the result of the war, it takes a fool to think the Chinese didn't. And if anyone in China has ever cracked open a history book that even tangentially touches on Russia's usual method of war, then they also knew Russia's invasion would include an attack upon the food supply because frankly this is what Russia has targeted every time they've ever tried to break Ukraine. In other words, China knew what a Russo-Ukrainian war would cause, and they knew its effects would suit their purposes perfectly.
There are other notable minutiae. In the case of both the Lavrov/Yi meeting and the Putin/Xi meeting, it was the Russian official who traveled to meet with his counterpart in China, not the other way around. In both Russian and Chinese culture, it is traditionally accepted that the one who is subordinate comes and the one who is superior waits, and the sentiment among Russian oligarchs, in the time between the two meetings, that Russia was becoming a vassal state of China did not go unnoticed (Yuan). This stands to reason, because during every phase of the buildup to that war happened after Russian officials were summoned to China to meet their Senior Counterparts and receive marching orders, orders which led Russia into a war that has ruined Russia (Carbonaro) while benefiting their Chinese masters (Myers & Buckley).
And frankly, I wouldn't give a damn about China sending Russia to its ruin, if it weren't for one problem. Russia's death throes are killing Ukrainian civilians by the thousands (Gonzales et al.). China has let their dog (Russia) off its leash, and right now that dog is biting the Hell out of one of the neighbors (Ukraine). And while the neighbor is doing an admirable job fighting off the dog, it's still pretty obvious that once a dog has tasted Human flesh it has to be put down.
...And you know, where I'm from, when you have to shoot a dog because it got loose and bit a neighbor, you take the neighbor who got bitten, and the gun you shot the dog with, and have a "friendly chat" with the owner.
Just Sayin'.
(1) I'm curious, considering neither country is a member of NATO, how does China claim that this insistence that they have a say in the foreign policy decisions of Ukraine and the admissions policy of an alliance neither of them is party to, while claiming China "does not interfere in foreign countries?" By even HAVING an opinion at all, China is claiming they hold authority over Ukraine and all of Europe.
(2) This article acknowledges its own obvious rebuttal (namely, that China was lying to cover for Putin) by saying if China knew than the embassy in Kyiv would have made plans to evacuate its citizens, plans which they did not begin making until the war began. Because after all, we know how much China cares for the safety of its citizens, right? And as evidence of that last sentence, the article cites (I shit you not) the movie Wolf Warrior. Yes, a member of a major US Think Tank, cited a B-movie whose only goal was to drum up patriotic fervor, as evidence of a totalitarian regime's concern for its citizens, and uses that in an effort to deny that China had foreknowledge of an invasion which they, in fact, masterminded.
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