Page 27 - RusRPTMar23

The Biggest Winner. As the U.S., EU, the UK have all scaled back operations with Russia, China has emerged, by a wide margin, Russia’s most important trade partner. It now receives about 20% of Russia’s total exports and is the source of over 35% of Russia’s total imports(Figure 13).
2.7 World polarised into liberal and illiberal spheres
The world is increasingly polarised into liberal and illiberal spheres and outside the liberal west both China and Russia’s stars have been rising, according to report from the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University.
As bne IntelliNews has reported, we are living in an increasingly fractured world. Rather than a return to the Cold War division of east and west based on ideological grounds, commercial interests are driving the foreign policy for the overwhelming majority of developing countries. Europe and the US are backing Ukraine against Russia as they see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as an attack on European values, but most of the countries outside Europe (and several within) the war is an irrelevance to them and they continue to judge Russia on the basis of its commercial generosity.
Three quarters (75%) of the 1.2bn people living in liberal democracies now hold a negative view of China and 87% hold a negative view towards Russia. But the opposite is true for the 6.3bn people who reside outside of liberal democracies where 70% have a positive view of China and 66% of Russia.
27 RUSSIA Country Report March 2023 www.intellinews.com