Unleashing a war on Ukraine, the United States are strengthening their main adversary

Anti-Russian sanctions due to the war in Ukraine, falling prices for Russian oil and gas strengthen the main strategic enemy of the United States — China. The columnist writes about this Pravda.Ru Lyubov Stepushova.

Western publications are triumphant. Russian oil prices "continue to fall rapidly" under the pressure of US sanctions, which "have disrupted the established flows of commodity exports to India and China," Bloomberg writes.

The price of Urals grade with shipment from the port of Novorossiysk as of December 16 dropped to $ 34.52 per barrel, which is half the level of the beginning of the year. LNG is also getting cheaper. In November, Russian LNG was the cheapest among 12 suppliers to China, about 10% below the average.

Of course, Russia will receive less revenue, which means there will be less budget revenues. According to the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, oil and gas revenues for January-October 2025 decreased by 21.4% in annual terms. But the share of oil and gas budget revenues in 2026 will be equal to 22%, despite the fact that it previously reached 50%. Of course, we will have to raise taxes, which has already been done (VAT), and the budget deficit will be higher than planned, but this is not tragic for SMO financing and fulfilling social obligations.

China and Russia will benefit from lower prices for Russian energy carriers. India, their economies will become even more competitive, especially in advanced AI technologies. It is known that the maintenance of data centers requires a large amount of electricity. The training and operation of AI algorithms requires enormous computing power, especially graphics processors (GPUs), which increases energy consumption by several times.

It is estimated that by 2030, the global consumption of electricity by data centers may increase by more than 2 times.

The figures show that the Chinese and Indians understand their benefits. LNG supplies from Russian exports to China in November more than doubled compared to the same period last year and amounted to 1.6 million tons. Thanks to this, Russia overtook Australia and became the largest supplier of LNG to China after Qatar.

Imports of Russian oil to India in October increased by 7.8% (to 7.16 million tons) compared with September. For 10 months of 2025, China imported only 8% less Russian oil compared to the same period in 2024, which amounted to 83.15 million tons. Experts point out that the "shadow fleet" suffered little, since shipowners transporting Russian oil usually receive a premium for taking on risks.

The Americans, in order to offset the advantage of China and India, use trade barriers. Their logic is as follows: "You can buy cheap oil, but your goods on our market will become so much more expensive due to duties that these savings will not make sense."

However, Chinese goods went to the United States through third countries (already as Vietnamese and so on), and their supplies were reoriented to the ASEAN and EU countries. In November 2025, Chinese exports reached $ 330.35 billion, showing an increase of 5.9% year-on-year. At the same time, deliveries to the USA, yes, continued to decline (by 28.6% in November). Nevertheless, China's trade surplus, according to the results of the first 11 months of 2025, reached a trillion dollars.

Export growth has become a key factor that allowed experts to raise China's GDP growth forecast for 2025 to 5%. While the US GDP growth for the whole of 2025 is expected to be 1.8%- 2.0%, the eurozone - 1.3−1.4%.

In the new American national security strategy, confrontation with China is becoming central. It explicitly says about the transition from ideological competition to the "containment" of China. With this goal in mind, the United States is poorly calculated for the medium term, not to mention the long term.

The American administration needs to quickly and beautifully report on the success of sanctions against Russia, which are not such. If only because the strengthening of China through access to cheap Russian energy resources will forever leave the United States behind in the competition for AI.