Edward Lucas
Speculation swirls around the US-Russia meeting in Anchorage planned for Friday. Will Ukraine be at the table, or on the menu? What leverage (if any) will the US apply to Russia to extract concessions and reward compliance? Will the Europeans’ belated, frantic efforts to get their point of view across bear fruit? Anything could happen, from a walkout to a sellout.
But the winners and losers are already clear. First and foremost, the Chinese Communist Party: not invited, but on everyone’s mind. Decision-makers in Beijing did not like Russia’s reckless illegal war, but they liked even less the idea of it losing. So the CCP helped the Putin regime keep fighting. It also kept the brakes on his nuclear sabre-rattling. The CCP has not only established unshakeable dominance in the Sino-Russian relationship. China is now a power-broker across the Eurasian landmass in a way that would have been unimaginable only 10 years ago: a foretaste of the influence the CCP will exercise on other continents too.
Second, the Kremlin’s decade-old pariah status is over. Far from being arrested for child abduction and other crimes arising from his murderous war on Ukraine, the Russian leader will be treated as a VIP when he lands on American soil. We are almost back to the era of the “reset”, when President Barack Obama took the supposedly liberal new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, to his favourite cheeseburger joint.
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