Sanctions, and the turn toward China

Two things ran in parallel over the past decade: rounds of Western sanctions and exclusions, and a steady deepening of Russia's ties with China — trade, infrastructure, technology.

The timing and the direction are documented. The causal link is not settled: some analysts read the turn east as a response to sanctions, others as a shift that was already under way and simply accelerated.

Worth reading in both presses, because each tends to report only one of those two readings.

What is hard to dispute is where Russia's economic centre of gravity sits now compared with ten years ago.