The sudden vanishing of Bao Fan, the head of China Renaissance Holdings, whose clients include ride-hailing Didi Chuxing and food-delivery app Meituan, has once again stirred the hornet’s nest in China. While such disappearances are not strange in authoritarian China, the frequency of such incidents at a time when President Xi Jinping is tightening political control, amidst China’s economic troubles, is revealing.
In the last few years, there has been an impressive acceleration in Italy’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific and not only in terms of economic presence, which was already very marked, but also political attention.
Well, after an year of Russia–Ukraine war or Moscow’s special ops one thing is for sure that there are no winners and the whole world especially the deprived developing countries, who had nothing to do with these power games, are big losers.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second year and the path to ending the war remains uncertain, China is increasingly feeling constrained by and conflicted with its national interests and strategic goals, the exaggerated limitless partnership with Russia, and its overdependence on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and G-7 countries for its economic and technological rise.
One year on, the Ukraine war is set to escalate. The West is supplying Kyiv with ever more sophisticated weapons with which to continue fighting, and Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin deepen their conviction that they are fighting for the survival of Mother Russia. The shadow of nuclear war has darkened over the world, as never before since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
On 24 February, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, not only provoking the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, but also setting in motion geopolitical trends that are likely to change the contours of the post-Cold War global order.