Also just had a thought that maybe Vlad knows his military is in bad shape, this may be his way of getting having a prime example for other units of how not doing it well will get you killed and getting rid of deadwood in the upper ranks.
If cleaned up enough, it might survive an attack on Germany to reclaim say, Berlin.
Interesting article on China and Taiwan as well:
Chinese officials are looking at ways to defend the country from economic attack if the West should look to sanction
China in the same way it did
Russia — stoking fears the nation is preparing for an invasion of
Taiwan.
China's regulators held an emergency meeting on April 22 between officials from China’s central bank, the finance ministry, domestic banks operating within China, and international lenders such as
HSBC.
The West's harsh economic sanctions on Russia prompted the emergency meeting, with the Ministry of Finance stating that President Xi’s administration had been put on alert by the surprise dollar freeze.
The news comes as the UK and the US held top level talks on how to manage a crisis in Asia, should China invade Taiwan.
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory despite the island nation functioning under a separate government since 1949.
The US is thought to be considering proportionate sanctions on China in the event it invades Taiwan, envisioning a similar scenario to the one playing out in Ukraine.
'No one on site could think of a good solution to the problem,' the
Financial Times quoted a source as saying. 'China’s banking system isn’t prepared for a freeze of its dollar assets or exclusion from the Swift messaging system as the US has done to Russia.'
China is looking to expand the amount renminbi in circulation relative to its US-dollar holdings.
One idea was to force exporting Chinese businesses to ditch their dollar holdings in exchange for renminbi.
Another suggestion was to cut to the $50,000 quota that Chinese nationals are allowed to purchase every year for overseas travel, education and other offshore purchases.
Other potential solutions such as swamping some US dollar holdings for Euros were not thought to be practical, but some doubted the US would have the capacity to sanction China — the world's seconded largest economy — in the same way it did Russia.
'It is difficult for the US to impose massive sanctions against China,' said Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong. 'It is like mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war.'
Although Chinese businesses have refrained from overtly doing business with Vladimir Putin's regime since he gave the order to invade Ukraine, President Xi Jinping has reportedly retained some economic ties with Russia.
Kurt Campbell, the White House Indo-Pacific co-ordinator, and Laura Rosenberger, the top National Security Council China official, held a meeting on Taiwan with UK representatives in early March.
The US is looking to boost cooperation with European allies, as well as engaging with Japan and Australia after Beijing stepped up military activity.
China continually violates Taiwanese airspace, escalating deployments over the past year.
'Deterring Chinese aggression against Taiwan is in everyone’s interest. It is not just an Indo-Pacific issue, it is a global issue,' said Heino Klinck, a former top Pentagon Asia official. 'US military planners are not counting on Germany or France sending warships, or Britain sending a carrier in the case of a conflict over Taiwan.
'But when those countries send ships to the South China Sea, or transit the Taiwan Strait, it sends a strong signal to China.'
WHY IS CHINA WORRIED ABOUT FOREIGN CURRENCY SANCTIONS?
Russia has approximately $630billion frozen in place by foreign sanctions, a buffer fund designed to help it prop up the value of the Rouble.
But Russia is only the world's seventh biggest holder of foreign currency reserves, making it less vulnerable to such sanctions than countries more reliant on the international system.
China, by contrast, is the world's largest holders, according the IMF, carrying a whopping $3.2trillion in foreign currency reserves.
After its economic miracle which propelled China to become the world's second largest country, China's sustained its growth by increasing exports to the rest of the world.
A key element of the expansion was in copying Western products, finding ways to produce them in greater quantities, and then selling them back to the West at cheaper prices — boosting the Chinese economy.
One of the ways China is able to maintain cheap prices is by keeping the renminbi less valuable than the US dollar, for which it was labelled a currency manipulator.
Most countries allow the exchange rate of their currency to be decided by international lenders, but the People’s Bank of China only allows the dollar to be exchanged for a fixed amount of renminbi — a lower amount than would be accepted without government intervention, keeping Chinese goods cheap and competitive.
But such a tactic forces China to hold more dollars than it would otherwise, leaving it with an enormous amount of dollars.
Because of its export market, China now owns about 3.68% of the $28.9trillion US national debt, making it vulnerable to the same kind of foreign asset freezes placed on Russia's central bank.
