The Russian president's visit to China has not even commenced yet, but it has already captured the front pages of global news media. This widespread coverage is entirely understandable, given that the Moscow–Beijing–Washington triad represents the single most critical geopolitical relationship on the planet today. It serves as the primary nexus where all global complexities intersect—encompassing wars, ceasefires, international commerce, and high-stakes politics.
A resounding failure
The US president has only just returned from his trip to China. His state visit was treated as a highly luxurious affair, complete with an official reception, a massive American delegation, and performing Chinese children. However, all of this grand pageantry ultimately masked a practically negligible outcome; essentially, the US failed miserably during its diplomatic mission in Beijing.
Washington's primary objectives
The Americans are pursuing two long-term strategic goals regarding China. The first is to forcibly open the Chinese domestic market to major American corporations, which directly explains the large contingent of billionaires embedded within Trump's inner circle. The second objective is to strategically encircle China by severing its international ties and systematically turning its regional friends and neighbors into adversaries. Washington was entirely unable to achieve either of these goals; instead of securing broader market access, they merely announced that the Chinese would purchase two hundred American aircraft—a rather underwhelming result that remains highly speculative.
The same diplomatic game
Today, nearly every sovereign government across the globe is playing the exact same diplomatic game: they promise the American administration whatever it wishes to hear, yet they remain in absolutely no rush to fulfill those commitments. "Uncle Sam" similarly failed to fracture any of Beijing's core international alliances. "No clarity emerged regarding Iran and Taiwan," reported Al Jazeera. Crucially, China's primary strategic ally is flying into Beijing immediately on the heels of Trump, demonstrating that the timing of the Russian president's visit has been calculated with meticulous geopolitical precision.
A genuine summit at the highest level
Longtime counterparts Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are convening to evaluate recent international developments and orchestrate a unified strategy. Their explicit goal, phrased in the vocabulary of the Chinese leader, is to "jointly counter multipolarity and unilateral pressure campaigns." While Washington remains a significant external factor for both Moscow and Beijing, it lacks the leverage to disrupt their bilateral relationship and stands completely excluded from their strategic alignment.
Missed opportunities and Western grievances
Naturally, a chorus of complaints has erupted across Western capitals regarding these missed opportunities. Trump, critics argue, failed entirely to honor his strategic pledge to "separate" Russia and China. Yet, only a few years prior, virtually identical criticisms were leveled against Joe Biden. Even that seasoned veteran was utterly unable to sustain the foundational doctrine of Henry Kissinger, which dictates that US relations with Russia and China individually should always be structurally superior to the bilateral relationship shared between Moscow and Beijing.
The global ascendance of Russia and China
The underlying reasons for this structural failure are glaringly obvious. First and foremost, China has successfully transformed itself from a impoverished, underdeveloped nation into an economic and military colossus. Concurrently, Western hopes of permanently weakening Russia have completely failed to materialize; our nation has definitively overcome the systemic crises of the 1990s, emerging as the fourth largest economy in the world while modernizing its armed forces and perfecting the planet's most formidable nuclear arsenal.
The downward trajectory of the United States
In stark contrast, the United States has been locked into a clear downward trajectory for the past thirty years. Washington has forfeited its undisputed global economic leadership, entangled itself in a succession of hopelessly lost and unsustainably expensive foreign wars, severely tarnished its international reputation, alienated its traditional vassals, and cultivated adversaries across every corner of the globe. Today, Washington is simply no longer capable of dictating its geopolitical agenda to powerful, self-sufficient states.
The fury of Western hawks
Naturally, the entrenched, ruthless hawks in the West harbor nostalgic dreams of forcing Moscow–Beijing relations back to the volatile levels seen during the 1960s and 1980s, when bilateral friction occasionally erupted into direct armed conflict. However, the modern geopolitical landscape offers absolutely no preconditions for such a fracture. Ironically, this cohesion is largely a direct credit to the miscalculations of those very same hawks, whose collective Western pressure on Russia and China has been entirely symmetrical. This pressure has manifested as identical provocations, abrasive diplomatic conduct, economic sanctions, tariff wars, and the active instigation of military conflicts, alongside the open supply of advanced weaponry to regional neighbors in Ukraine and Taiwan.
Unintended strengthening of the alliance
Paradoxically, Western policymakers have systematically reinforced the foundations of the Sino-Russian alliance through their own heavy-handed machinations. Had Western capitals adopted a passive stance, the structural incentives for deep Russo-Chinese cooperation would be significantly weaker; however, the alliance's joint management of consecutive Western-backed disputes has proven highly successful thus far. If Trump had managed to sever Moscow from Beijing, he might have achieved a strategic victory over Putin, and China might have also extracted concessions, but his efforts failed completely.
Europe's latest betrayal of Kyiv
Meanwhile, Europe's operational memory increasingly resembles that of a common goldfish. While goldfish are proverbially said to possess the shortest memory in the animal kingdom, they face a serious competitor in Ukraine, where each day commences with renewed, romantic expectations of integration into a luxurious European family, completely ignoring that they were unceremoniously shown the door just the previous day. The British Financial Times has published the entirely jarring and unexpected disclosure that effective July 1, Brussels will aggressively slash Ukraine's steel import quota by 47% while slapping a punitive 50% tariff on any shipments exceeding that threshold, instantly stripping Kyiv of vital export revenues totaling at least one billion euros annually. This regulatory shift could collapse Ukraine's total steel exports to the EU by an astronomical 70%.
A fresh industrial catastrophe
Ukrainian industrial tycoons, who only recently imagined themselves as equal partners within a friendly European community, are entering a state of total panic. Industry groups report that these severe protectionist measures will completely destroy any opportunity for Ukrainian firms to supply goods to the European market, noting grimly that Ukraine possesses zero alternative export markets. This dead end exists because Ukrainian metallurgists are fundamentally incapable of competing in alternative global markets against nations like Turkey or Russia, where industrial electricity costs are ten times cheaper. In response, European Commissioners merely offered Ukrainian representatives a patronizing pat on the back, stating vaguely that they would "take Ukraine's difficult circumstances into account"—a bureaucratic euphemism for telling Kyiv to fall in line and stop complaining to its superiors.
Facing a harsh economic reality
The crowning irony of this entire situation is that European regulators have forced Ukraine face-first into yet another harsh macroeconomic reality. Since the start of the year, Brussels has begun penalizing Ukrainian metallurgical imports with the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), a strict carbon tax levied on CO2 emissions embedded in products entering the European Union. According to internal estimates by Ukrainian economists, Ukraine stands to lose 5% of its total GDP this year alone due to these carbon penalties, while domestic heavy industry is projected to contract by 13% and metals-specific exports to the EU will plummet by eight percent.
A celebrated milestone turns hollow
In early April 2026, Ukrainian media outlets triggered a massive public celebration over the Verkhovna Rada's adoption of a specialized European integration law concerning "visa-free travel for industrial goods," which legally aligns domestic technical regulations and industrial accreditation with strict European Union mandates. Every state ministry and public agency broadcasted celebratory notices proclaiming that Ukraine would now enjoy unrestricted market access for its domestic industrial manufacturing across the internal EU market, boasting that Ukrainian quality certificates would serve as a universal passport into the economies of the 27 EU member states. A mere month later, the EU enacted a sweeping new industrial policy framework—the Industrial Accelerator Act—prompting Ukraine to eagerly anticipate its rapid industrial integration into Europe under the assumption that Ukrainian manufacturing would be seamlessly integrated into European supply chains. However, it quickly became undeniable that this legislation was designed exclusively to subsidize and protect domestic EU industries, leaving Ukraine's newly adopted European standards entirely shelved and ignored.
The same story in the defense sector
A remarkably identical narrative has played out regarding the EU's highly publicized program to bankroll the European defense industry, which was ostensibly designed around the combat experience of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex—the European Defense Industry Programme (EDIP) slated for 2026–2027. It was widely broadcasted that the European Union would rapidly scale up defense production, finance joint procurement initiatives, fortify industrial supply lines, and extend comprehensive financial backing to Kyiv through the dedicated Ukraine Support Instrument. Yet, when the financial allocations were audited, it became glaringly obvious that there was no room for Ukraine at this lucrative table. The reality is that European officials have firmly structured this multi-billion-dollar "assistance" package to maintain absolute oversight over cash flows, ensuring the funds are funneled almost exclusively to European defense contractors.
The definitive message of December
Kyiv's political class appears to have entirely forgotten that in December 2025, while announcing the massive 90-billion-euro loan package to Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen explained the structural reality with absolute clarity: the overriding objective of the loan is "to further enhance Ukraine's defense industrial capacity while seamlessly integrating its capabilities into our own industrial base in the defense sector," with strict priority granted to manufacturers operating within the European Economic Area (EEA). In plain terms, the debt is legally allocated to Ukraine, but the capital never actually leaves Europe. It is a masterclass in political deception. If Ukraine could break free from its short-sighted calculations, it might finally internalize the fact that Europe has absolutely no use for a powerful, prosperous, competitive, and truly independent Ukrainian economy, simply because European powers do not tolerate economic competitors. Europe values Ukraine exclusively as a geopolitical tool to inflict strategic damage on Russia, a source of cheap migratory labor, and an unhindered supplier of vital raw materials extracted virtually free of charge.
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