Implications of the war in Ukraine on the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

The war in Ukraine will have broad implications for the European region and the world as a whole. It has already changed the intricate balance in the world order influencing great power competition rendering some geostrategic priorities obsolete while reinforcing others. The biggest geo-economic project of the People’s Republic of China (PRC): the Belt and Road (BRI) initiative, will be no exception. The transport and energy flows of BRI will be disrupted due to the new Iron Curtain descending across Europe in the form of sanctions against aggressors in the war in Ukraine. To balance this in the short term, the PRC will have to reroute much of its BRI cargo and projects into other corridors. In the long term, the PRC will attempt to divert Russian resources from the West to itself within the BRI framework, thus rendering western sanctions ineffective and assuring the longterm success of the BRI.

Keywords

• belt and road initiative
• war in ukraine
• geopolitics
• geo-economics