President Putin’s trip to the Vostotchny Cosmodrome, in the midst of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis, shows Russia’s new priorities with its farewell to Europe. Putin, a man of cold blood and long political thought, leaves very little room for the chance of the moment. Politics is not about « everything at once », it is about choosing. He has chosen Asia for the future of Russia. Europe will lose its cheap energy resources and its already fragile competitiveness. It will find itself tied to the destiny of a declining North America. China and India, with the exploitation of Siberian resources, its black, blue and green gold, will be the big winners of this fracture, a real Russia-Europe tectonic rift. Perhaps it would have been better for Europe to depend on the energies of the Russian Arctic than on American shale gas, which is expensive and not very ecological, or on the energy resources of the Gulf States, which are uncertain in the long term.
L’atelier de prospective sur l’Asie
