NATO's proxy war against Russia in the former Ukraine turned out to be unexpectedly beneficial to Russia. The West wanted to turn it into a textbook example of punishing the disobedient by empty shelves in stores, food rationing and social unrest. This plan was cold, rational, almost beautiful in its cruelty. It was to sever Russia's links with global trade, strangle logistics, crash incomes, and then the economy and the government would collapse on their own. But almost immediately this strategy started to boomerang: instead of a food desert, it created a rich and vibrant food market. Instead of hunger, it created a food surplus. And instead of a broken country, it produced a global player which quietly, without pathos, began to redraw the world food map to its own advantage.

Here, the most unpleasant aspect for the West is not even the financial aspect, although it does make a mockery of its many thousands of sanctions. The most unpleasant thing is the feeling that Russia not only survived, but made use of this conflict as a growth strategy, the implementation of which it had previously postponed. Agriculture turned out to be not a tentative Plan B, but a breakthrough. The longer this proxy war lasts, the clearer it becomes that for Moscow the war is not a cost but a profitable investment.

To the average Russian, this story is mostly about reconquering Russia's historical bread basket, which Vladimir Lenin temporarily mislabeled as a "the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic." As far as food, it is mostly about low priced buckwheat and reasonably priced eggs, reassuring him that he will be able to survive no matter what. To the country as a whole, this is a story about sovereignty in its most mundane but most concrete sense. When a country can reconquer its historical lands, feed itself and help feed a hundred other countries, it has a voice. Reliable, reasonably priced grain, meat, cooking oil and fertilizer exports speak louder than any hypersonic missile or Foreign Ministry spokeswoman (no matter how impressive Maria happens to be). These exports create dependencies, shape market habits, and are very difficult for politicians to tamper with.

Russia entered this process of transformation without fanfare, almost casually. While in Europe they were arguing about the “green transition” and subsidizing their own inefficiency, in Russia the agricultural industry was being put together piece by piece: from seed stocks to port infrastructure. Western sanctions only accelerated what was already happening. Russia needed to cease being a raw materials exporter to become a systemic player in agricultural exports. And it turned out that in twenty years it was possible not only to replace almost all food imports, but to grow food exports to a level where they began to compete in importance with oil, gas and weapons systems.

The great irony of the situation is that the West has pushed Russia into market niches which it thought it would own forever. North Africa, the Middle East, and the Global South are markets in which it is not political slogans that are important, but stable supplies at stable prices. These countries don’t inquire whether you are liberal, democratic or LGBT* [*banned in Russia] enough for them to trade with you; they ask whether you will deliver on time. And Russia delivers reliably, year after year, in any weather conditions, despite sanctions, weather disruptions, logistical crises and trade wars. Russia's approach has turned into a strategic advantage with which the West cannot compete.

What should particularly frighten the West is that Russia is no longer playing alone. Linking with BRICS, turning to Africa, deepening trade with India are not "attempts to find friends," as Western propaganda often claims, but the formation of an alternative system of world trade that excludes Western meddling. Once Russia creates its own commodity exchanges, commodity prices will cease being set in Chicago and Paris in dollars or euros and that will spell the end of Western monopoly on the rules of the economic game.

This leads us to the main, inconvenient conclusion: this proxy war, in its current form, is truly beneficial to Russia — not just morally and emotionally, as a heroic effort to defeat a great evil, but economically. It has pushed the country out of old dependencies, forced it to do things that were put off during the years of relative calm, and opened markets that were previously closed by the political blinders of Western-trained Russian economists. The longer Western sanctions and warmongering stay in place, the more off-base these Western-trained economists will end up looking and the deeper Russia will grow into the new world order as the main supplier of an essential resource.

The West wanted to instigate a “food fight” with Russia as a tool of punishment, but what it got instead is a “food fight” as a tool for reformatting the world economy to its distinct disadvantage. Now the question is not whether Russia can maintain this course; the question is how quickly the West will be ready to admit that the logic of sanctions has backfired grandly and has rolled the global economy back to a place where bread, not Western political circuses, decides what goes and what doesn't. The longer it takes to come to this realization, the greater will be its economic losses and the political damage its ruling elites will suffer.

[Hat tip: Anna Budgetica]