What is the Chinese actually looking to gain from keeping up support for a more and more delapidated Putin regime? That’s a question I get a lot and the suggested answers are plenty – are they hoping for the Americans to hand them Taiwan in exchange for Ukraine? Are they hoping to draw the Americans into an exhausting war while cheering on from the sidelines? What’s the endgame? My answer is a completely different one. Just like almost anything else in these 2020’s, it’s all about subscription models. And hard currency. More on that later.

A couple of weeks ago the legendary Chinese diplomat Wang Yi went for a European Tour to plant seeds ahead of president Xi’s visit to Moscow this week. Wang didn’t just bring nice words, however – he also had a Chinese peace plan in his suitcase. The Chinese had as usual taken a dive into the history books and found an obscure old division of Ukraine info “left- and rightbank Ukraine”, which they then thought would apply really well to a 21^st century setting. The entire area east of the Dniepr was to be de-militarized Korea style and then the Ukrainians would accept becoming a diplomatic no-mans-land as a pure buffer zone between Europe and Russia. We’re only used to Americans being so self-confident that they sit in their Washington office and draw up peaceplans for a conflict in a remote part of the world, but it seems that the Chinese have arrived at that junction too. The Russians were of course over the moon, but in Western capitals the Chinese peace plan only met shaking heads.

Fast forward to this week,