Report: Sanctions Are Not Debilitating Russia but Driving It Closer to China

The thousands of economic sanctions levied on Russia for its full-scale war on Ukraine have not kneecapped its economy as the West had hoped; instead, they have pushed Russia closer to China, EuroIntelligence wrote on May 29.

The report notes:

• Europe’s sanctions on Russia have been halfhearted and have left the Russian economy “booming.”
• The Russian economy today is on a war footing.
• The leadership has hollowed out much of the nation’s ordinary economy to transform it into one focused on military mobilization.
• This produces an economic “sugar high,” which is not an optimal long-term strategy.
• But at present, the Russian economy is humming.

Remember all those Russian economic experts and former oligarchs who have been predicting that Vladimir Putin would run out of money? … Its [gross domestic product] growth exceeds expectations and certainly the gdp growth of European countries. Russia’s budget deficit is falling fast. … The short-term resilience of Russia’s war economy is remarkable.
—EuroIntelligence report

Enter China: Russia is withstanding international pressure far better than most analysts expected. This is thanks largely to increasingly close relations with China. The report states:

[S]anctions on both Russia and on China have intensified the China-Russia relationship, which is now the strategically most important two-country relationship in the Eurasian continent.

Long-held forecast: Today, everyone can see that Russia and China have formed an ironclad axis. But the Trumpet and our forerunner magazine, the Plain Truth, have been warning for decades that these two would join together to make war in the modern era.

Even when Russia and China were at war in the 1950s and 1960s, we maintained our forecast that they would ally—because that forecast is founded on Bible prophecy.

To understand, read our Trends article “Why the Trumpet Watches Russia Allying With China.”