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alternative, as fertilizers are scarcely available from other sources besides Russia.
Monthly shipments of cars and car parts from the EU to Belarus have increased fivefold over two years, reaching $268mn. The EU plans to tighten sanctions against Minsk to synchronize them with anti-Russian restrictions. Specifically, the EU may tighten the conditions for supplying luxury cars, dual-use goods, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Belarus. Additionally, Brussels plans to ban the import of diamonds from Belarus. These measures aim to eliminate one of the channels used to circumvent sanctions.
Trade with China is booming. Take metalworking machine tools, which are needed to make arms. Before the war in Ukraine, many of Russia’s providers of advanced types were from America, Europe and rich countries in Asia. Sanctions cut those supplies, prompting Russia to turn to China. In 2022 Russia’s imports of machine tools from China grew by nearly 120% to $362m, according to Chinese trade figures. In 2023 they rose again by nearly 170%. China’s share of these Russian imports grew from less than 30% before the war to about 60% in 2022 and 88% in 2023. Writing for the Jamestown Foundation, an American research outfit, Pavel Luzin calls this dependency on China a “growing weakness and vulnerability” for Mr Putin.
China must relish this transformation. In the early days of the People’s Republic, before the Sino-Soviet split that began in the late 1950s, China leant heavily on the Soviet Union, its “big brother”, for aid and arms. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (csis), an American think-tank, reckons Mr Xi’s trip to Moscow in March last year accelerated the shift. In a report on Russia’s defence industry, published in April, it said there was a “sharp increase” that month of Chinese shipments to Russia of dual-use goods designated by America as “high priority” (see chart 3). This means they are of great importance in manufacturing Russian arms and are subject to tight export controls in America and its allied countries.
Electrical machinery and parts, such as computer chips, make up the biggest share of Russia’s imports of high-priority products. Nearly all of Russia’s leading foreign suppliers of key military-related goods are from mainland China and Hong Kong, csis notes. Data compiled by The Economist show that China’s exports of semiconductors to Russia were worth $407m in 2023, up from $230m in 2021. Its sales to Russia of machinery for making chips grew spectacularly in the same period, from a mere $3.5m to nearly $180m.
The high-priority list includes ball bearings, used in the making of tanks. China’s exports of these surged nearly 170% last year compared with the same period of 2021, the year before Russia’s invasion. China’s sales of them to Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, rocketed by more than 1,800%. “While it’s possible that Kyrgyzstan’s domestic market suddenly requires ball bearings, the much more likely explanation is that these products are immediately re-exported to Russia,” Markus Garlauskas and fellow scholars wrote for the Atlantic Council, a think-tank in Washington.
99 RUSSIA Country Report June 2024 www.intellinews.com