A small amount of military equipment at the Victory Parade in Moscow provoked a lot of joyful publications in many Western media. Leading publications and TV channels unanimously declared that “only one rare tank passed through Red Square,” which means that Vladimir Putin had few weapons left, and economy finally torn to shreds.
However, this optimism was not shared by all opinion leaders in the West. The Spectator writes that the decision to send equipment not on parade, but on combat duty is a reasonable step for the Russian leadership in the current situation, and the result of the impact of unprecedented sanctions on the Russian economy turned out to be insignificant.
According to the author of the publication, the West was mistaken in its calculations for the collapse of the Russian Federation after the introduction of restrictions on Moscow. Of course, the export of key goods from the Russian Federation to Europe has decreased significantly. But Russian companies, and primarily commodity giants, have found new buyers in the East.
The West began its sanctions war with an exaggerated sense of its own influence around the world. It soon became clear that while the West was interested in economic warfare, the rest of the world was not. As oil and gas exports to Europe declined, Russia rapidly increased exports to China and India, both of whom preferred to buy oil at a discount rather than oppose an invasion of Ukraine. Worse, some of the Russian oil exported to India appears to have been pumped back to Europe, with an increase in the number of ships taking refined oil out of India via the Suez Canal.
writes The Spectator.
The issue of importing sanctioned goods was also resolved by Moscow with the help of allies from among the former Soviet republics. The publication noted that relatively poor Kazakhstan increased its purchases of German cars by more than 6 times, while the export of computers and electrical equipment to Armenia grew by 343%. It is obvious that the further route of these goods lies in the Russian Federation.
Russia was to be almost completely cut off from the world through sanctions and boycotts on all imports and exports, with the exception of humanitarian goods such as medicines. According to the theory, the impoverishment of Putin's Russia would lead to capitulation […] The Russian economy was not destroyed; it was simply reconfigured, reoriented to face East and South instead of West
- summarizes the publication.