‘World Will Awaken from Ukrainian Conflict to a Vastly Reinforced Russia,’ Says Former French Navy Chief

PARIS, July 9, 2022 (EIRNS)—In an article published July 8 on the website of a high-level security association, the Cercle K2, former French Navy Chief of Staff Adm. Alain de Dainville, (in French) explains how Russia’s defense against the Western sanctions and NATO’s military threat “are helping to redirect the flows of globalization” and reinforcing Russia’s role in the world.

First, the disruption of financial exchanges provoked by the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT system has favored the emergence of competing systems, the Russian SPFS and the Chinese Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS). SWIFT’s financial hegemony is under attack in a rivalry that is focussed on the transmission carrier, i.e., fiber optic cables over which the Russian Navy is, however, well equipped to intervene.

Then, a new balance is sought in energy flows. This reconfiguration of flows requires adapting infrastructures, refineries, liquefaction plants and opening new maritime routes to compensate for the inadequacy of oil and gas pipelines. It requires increased recourse to oil tankers and LNG pipelines, whose need and traffic are growing, increasing insecurity on maritime routes, especially in straits.

But the most sensitive point is the food crisis, caused by the difficulties of exporting cereals, the most severe crisis because it affects vital needs, destabilizes countries in the Middle East and Africa, and cannot be solved by printing money. It increases pressure among the starving to find a solution to this “war of the rich,” pitting the Russians back to back to the Americans, but especially the United States accused of abusing their dominant position on the cereals market....

Thus, Russia seems to have a double ambition, to create a defensive glacis and to increase its status as a power in globalization through its role in OPEC+ and in grain production.

“The powers that have maritime ambitions want to reshape the seas through railroad corridors or the digging of canals, as the West did in the past with Panama and Suez. Projects exist, Chinese, Turkish, Iranian, in Thailand, around Istanbul and elsewhere. Russia is not immune, developing the link between the Baltic and the Indian Ocean or to the Mediterranean via the Caspian Sea. It is reactivating, albeit modestly, the river network, called the International North-South Transport Corridor, in order to expand towards Asia and link St. Petersburg to Mumbai in 15 days.

“It thus seeks to make a node of transport between India, China and Russia escaping from the West, in the Caspian Sea which it connected by a canal to the Sea of Azov.... It thus increased its control over grain exports. The conquest of the majority of the south of Ukraine allows it to share the Black Sea with Turkey.... Russia can thus reach the Mediterranean, anchor itself a little more in Tartus in Syria, the gateway to the Middle East....”

The world will wake up from the Ukrainian nightmare with a Russia that is an actor in globalization, supported by a fleet that will remain formidable, especially undersea.

Thus, Russia is aggressively seeking to defend itself on land and to spread out to sea, in a shift from its traditional interest in the steppes of its nation’s heartland to more riparian-maritime geo-economic spaces.

The admiral is a strong Gaullist. It is the first time that such a high-level retired officer has made such statements publicly.