G-8 Russian Poll.

Russian daily Vzglyad positions itself as a business daily. It does, indeed, attract many comments from all kinds of public ranging from uber-liberal loonies to normal people to armies of mostly Ukrainian trolls. I use Vzglyad merely as news aggregator and, once in a while, source of either decent or, opposite, down right stupid opinion pieces. In all, I don't take it too seriously. Yet, Vzglyad does provide good feel for public opinion in Russia (granted very roughly approximate) and here is one from two days ago regarding possible Russia's return to G-7, or G-8, if one wishes. 

25, 576 people were polled on-line and 92.3% of those responded negatively to the question if Russia should return to Great Eight. Here are slightly updated results--nothing changed. To interpret these results is really easy for anyone who knows Russia not from pages of NYT or WaPo, or Moscow Times, or Kommersant, but knows Russia's and Russian people. Russia doesn't want to deal with the so called West and doesn't see herself as a part of it, she sees her future in Eurasia. Modern West lost any value for overwhelming majority of Russians and this is not the heat of the moment poll--it is a well defined long term trend which has massive geopolitical ramifications. Why? How about this little piece of news: Russia and China signed new package of documents on military cooperation, which allowed Sergei Shoigu to call it (in Russian) a new stage of Russian-Chinese cooperation. This somehow coincided with Igor Korotchenko, who is one of Russia's main insiders on defense, stating three days ago at Solovyov's show, that Russia should extend her anti-missile umbrella over China (in Russian).

So, something is up and who knows what we will observe in coming months. Chinese meanwhile are moving people and hardware to Russia for Center 2019 military exercise. These are very big maneuvers and they also are designed to address some issues with inevitable exit of the United States from Afghanistan and a shitstorm which will happen there once US leaves. Somebody needs to clean up the mess, once the Taliban scourge starts pouring over the borders. I wish Zbig was still alive to see the fruits of his policies.