On April 10 CGTN interviewed Russian Sen. Konstantin Kosachev, a deputy speaker of the upper house, the Federation Council, and currently member and a former chair of Federation Council Foreign Affairs Committee. Kosachev said that, in spite of the continued Western sanctions, Moscow doesn’t feel isolated: “I know perfectly well that the United Nations consists of 193 countries. I know perfectly well that just 40 countries plan tough sanctions against Russia, 40 countries out of 193 is … one-fifth. It is not the international community. It’s not the majority.… And Russia definitely will not give up because some 40 countries see the future of the world differently.”
In an article the previous day, April 10, reviewing UN votes in which expulsions and condemnations of Russia were claimed to have passed, the Washington Post noted with concern that aside from the draconian sanctions voted by the European Union as a body, “just seven countries in the world have sanctioned Russia.” The world map the paper published showed just six and did not name them, but they were the U.K., the United States, Canada, Ireland, Japan and Australia. This combination of “the Anglosphere” and the EU constitute the one-fifth or 40 countries referred to by Konstantin Kosachev. But the Post author, Adam Taylor, assured readers that although these countries are quite a minority of the world’s population and do not dominate its economic product either, they do have dominant control of its finances and its monetary system, “from the U.S. dollar to the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transactions.” Therefore he proclaimed them able completely to isolate Russia’s economy.
