Nobody else has the gravitas and commands the respect that the Russians do with Asia and the Middle East. From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.su:
The Asian world needs Russian diplomacy more than it has ever previously been needed.
It is, perhaps, appropriate that the rogue regime in Kiev is calling for the complete isolation of Russia’s entire diplomatic corps at a time when the Asian world needs Russian diplomacy more than it has ever previously been needed. Because Ukraine is no more in a position to make demands regarding Russia from the EU or NATO than a monkey is from its organ grinder, Ukraine should just prepare itself for the bleaker future coming its way when its EU and NATO welfare cheques run out and we, in our turn, should try to ignore whatever future inanities that emanate from those ignoramuses.
Or from the Finns, whose role is to niggle Russia in its northern Kola peninsula and try to disrupt whatever northern sea lanes Russia and China (a near Arctic power, it seems) open atop the world.
India, Iran and Russia have plans for a North South Transport (INSTC) Corridor, which might very well be a new Silk Road in its own right and which is certainly less threatening than this White House plan to militarise the Arctic, where China, with its DF-5s and DF-26 nuclear missiles, declares itself be a near Arctic power.
The Russian Federation, meanwhile, is discussing with Saudi Arabia Riyadh’s accession to this INSTC project which, though it offers benefits for India, Iran, Azerbaijan, Central Asia and Europe, is replete with the same sorts of risks of global war as had the Berlin to Baghdad Railway the German Kaiser proposed more than a century ago to circumvent the Anglosphere’s domination of the seas and the Suez Canal.
