Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was an inflection point for globalization. The economic integration between east and west that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 started to unravel.
That process will accelerate dramatically if Russia invades Ukraine and is met with punishing sanctions by the West. The resulting rupture would effectively leave Russia and China in their own economic bloc and the Western market-based democracies in another. It’s too soon to predict who wins this new economic Cold War, but not too soon to say that Russia will lose.
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