( ) Their card assumes US gains *in Russia’s perceived sphere of influence* - China is not.

The
card also mentions NATO, Iraq, Kosovo and missile defense as alt causes.
Umland 15 — Andreas Umland, Dr. phil., Ph. D., is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute
for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv, and General Editor of the book series “Soviet and
Post-Soviet Politics and Society”, 2015 (“How Sustainable is a Sino-Russian Entente?”, Silk
Road Reporters, May 18th, Available Online at
http://www.silkroadreporters.com/2015/05/18/how-sustainable-is-a-sino-russian-
entente/, Accessed 07-07-2016, SP)

Russia’s current economic, foreign affairs and international image problems will not
only impact relations with the West, but also her position vis-à-vis China and other
important players around the globe. Both, the ongoing economic recession as well as the
diminishing general trust towards oral and written assurances by the leadership of Russia
will be having effects beyond Russia-EU cooperation. Because of its erratic political
behavior, manifest breach of international law and low economic performance, as well as in
light of continuing Western sanctions, Russia is becoming a more risky and less solvent
partner not only for Western partners, but for everybody. This trend could continue, if not
increase during the next years, limit Russian growth prospects, and further diminish
Russia’s relative weight. To be sure, Russia was, in comparison to China, already an
underperforming market before the “Ukraine Crisis.” Some of the barriers for a
sustainable Sino-Russian alliance listed below have thus been growing before. By 2015,
Moscow’s position vis-à -vis Beijing has, however, become not only gradually different from
that of a couple of years ago. Russia’s comparative might is now being reduced by the
cumulative effect of (a) an imminent jump of China’s general position in the world, and (b)
an ever more acutely felt downturn of Russia, at the same time. When Russia started, with
China and the Central Asian republics, the Shanghai cooperation format in the second half of
the 1990s, the Chinese economy’s size had, only a few years earlier, overtaken that of
Russia. Russia’s greater military potential could, in the 1990s, still be seen as fully
substituting its lower economic weight, in its cooperation with China. It is also true that the
Russian economy has, since then, been rising for most of the time. At periods, this process
was, moreover, so pronounced that it led many observers around the globe to misperceive
Russia as a dynamic “emerging market” or “emerging power.” Whatever the earlier value of
the latter classifications, the Chinese economy has risen, in the same period, more
constantly, in more diverse ways, and much faster. As a result, the discrepancy between the
socio-economic weights and future prospects of the two dominating powers of the original
Shanghai format widened already during the last two decades. A, moreover, similar story
developed with regard to Russia’s international ties, and with regard to growing Russian
isolationism before the Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine. After the honeymoon in Russian-
Western relations of the early 1990s, there was already mounting estrangement between
Russia and the West, before the showdown of 2014. Yet, now this Russian-Western
estrangement is transmuting into a general international seclusion of Russia that effects her
relationships to, for instance, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. While
today’s trends are nothing principally new, the changing correlation of forces between
China and Russia, in 2015, is different from the one, in 2013. Russia’s industry is now
entering a protracted recession while China’s continues to impressively grow (even if at a
smaller scale than before). Russia is getting more alienated from its previously crucial
Western economic and political partners by the month. China, in contrast, is forging new
international relations with a multitude of actors across the globe. These diverging trends
are leading not only to a faster widening gap between, but also to a change in world-wide
perception about, Eurasia’s two supposedly Great Powers’ comparative weight. As Russia’s
economic problems and international political isolation are concurrently growing, her
relative decline will thus become more and more acutely felt. In the next years, Russia will
become an ever more obviously junior partner of China, and secondary player, in the SCO
(obviously, even more so, if India joins). These trends will also lead to a decline of Russia’s
impact within the BRICS group where its presence has always been an oddity. Ever since the
creation of BRICS, Russia stood out in the group as a petro-state benefitting from growing
energy prices. It never was a successfully developing economy with a dynamic industrial
or/and progressive service sector as, to one degree or another, all the other BRICS members
are. Now Russia’s always quirk position vis-à -vis both Western modern and non-Western
modernizing powers will become more manifest. It will relegate the Kremlin to a second-
rate player not only in Europe, but also in the SCO and BRICS – a kind of role to which it is
not accustomed. Lukyanov’s “fantasy” about a Sino-Russian alliance of two equals is more
fantastic than the author meant to imply. China will surely use Russia’s estrangement from
the West to its advantage, and may fill select trade and investment gaps resulting from the
decline of Russian-Western economic relations. Yet, Beijing will have less and less
grounds to treat Russia as a geopolitical equal and strategic ally.