China wants Milei to pay the swap and threatens to stop buying soy and meat

Furious over Mondino's contacts with Taiwan, Xi Jinping's government activated the swap payment mechanism and increased imports of soybeans and corn from Brazil. Preference to Australia and Uruguay for meats.

The serious diplomatic incident caused by the secret meeting of Foreign Minister Diana Mondino with the representative of Taiwan in the country could cost Argentina dearly. The Chinese government is currently evaluating implementing drastic retaliation such as demanding payment of the multi-billion dollar swap and stopping buying soybeans and meat from the country, sources familiar with the bilateral tension told LPO.

According to the sources consulted, the Asian giant has already taken the first steps to execute the payment of the swap section that the Alberto Fernández government spent, for about 5 billion dollars plus interest of around 6 percent. The tension reached such an extreme that the sources did not rule out that China would even move forward with the embargo on exports to collect money.

The activation of this payment process can last months and even years in the special times of the Chinese bureaucracy, which perhaps thus offers the Milei government a window to drastically rectify its anti-China stance.

Tension escalated after LPO exclusively revealed Mondino's meeting with Taiwan's trade representative, Miao-hung Hsie. A meeting that not only outraged the career diplomacy of the Palacio San Martín, who considered it a major clumsiness, but also the Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, who, in need of funds, seeks to reactivate the swap.

But the retaliation for what they consider a violation of their sovereignty, as the Chinese embassy itself in Buenos Aires made clear, could be even more serious: the communist government had already decided to start prioritizing Brazil in its purchases of soybeans and corn.

Geopolitics plays no small part in these decisions. President Lula maintains a strong alliance with China, while the Milei government did not wait a month to announce that it was withdrawing from the BRICS, the bloc that makes up both powers.

The decision of Xi Jinping's government to direct its purchases of soybeans and corn to Brazil has already begun to be noticed. Shipments of Brazilian grains reached 8.79 million tons, which represents more than 40% of imports of these grains from the People's Republic of China.

The sources consulted revealed that China is also analyzing stopping buying meat from Argentina and replacing those shipments with Australian meat and live cattle from Uruguay. In addition, it would suspend the procedure to lift sanitary barriers for poultry products and the purchase of meat offal, which had begun to be negotiated during Sergio Massa's visit to Beijing.

The closure of the Chinese market would be a devastating blow for the Argentine meat industry, which sends almost all of its exports to the Asian giant.

On November 21, two days after the runoff, the Chinese Foreign Ministry warned that it would be "a huge mistake in the president-elect's foreign policy to break relations with larger countries, such as China and Brazil," in reference to Milei's own statements that He called both nations "communist" and promised to break relations, a step that once taken he tried to moderate. These are Argentina's two main trading partners.

China is the country that has grown the most as a trading partner of Argentina in the last 15 years and has become an extremely relevant supplier of goods and machinery essential for the productivity of the Argentine industry.

"Breaking relations with our main commercial partners can lead us to a triple productive, social and financial implosion," Sabino Vaca Narvaja, former Argentine ambassador to China, told LPO. "China accounts for more than 90% of soybean exports, eight out of every ten kilos of meat exported in August of this year and approximately 60% of seafood, barley, sorghum and poultry," he added. According to foreign trade data published by Indec, in 2022 Argentina exported to China for 8,015 million dollars, which is equivalent to 9% of its total foreign trade. Meanwhile, in the first half of 2023, the latest data available, 2,711 million dollars were exported, equivalent to 8.1% of the total, drought through.

"The impact of diplomatic relations can be really very important in provinces such as Jujuy, Catamarca, Chaco, Entre Ríos, La Pampa, Santiago del Estero, San Luis and Formosa, where China accounts for up to 30% of its exports," Vaca warned. Narvaja and stressed that "breaking relations with China would make us Argentines lose millions of jobs." In fact, according to official data, Catamarca sold 45.4% of its total exports to China, Jujuy 28.52%, Chaco 28.29%, Entre Ríos 27.6%, Santiago del Estero 22.2 % and La Pampa 20.1%.

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The Ukrainian soldier stared at the Russian tank. It was destroyed over a year ago in the country’s east and now sat far from the front line. He shrugged and cut into its rusted hull with a gas torch. The soldier was not there for the tank’s engine or turret or treads. Those had already been salvaged. He was there for its thick armor. The metal would be cut and strapped as protection to Ukrainian armored personnel carriers defending the embattled town of Avdiivka, around 65 miles away.

Ukraine’s military prospects are looking bleak. Western military aid is no longer assured at the same levels as years past. Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive in the south, where Jaeger was wounded days after it began, is over, having failed to meet any of its objectives. And now, Russian troops are on the attack, especially in the country’s east. The town of Marinka has all but fallen. Avdiivka is being slowly encircled. A push on Chasiv Yar, near Bakhmut, is expected. Farther north, outside Kupiansk, the fighting has barely slowed since the fall. The joke among Ukrainian troops goes like this: The Russian army is not good or bad. It is just long. The Kremlin has more of everything: more men, ammunition and vehicles. And they are not stopping despite their mounting numbers of wounded and dead.

classic Nazi complaint that the enemy's only winning because of superior numbers :pit:

“The Russian advantage at this stage is not decisive, but the war is not a stalemate,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who recently visited Ukraine. “Depending on what happens this year, particularly with western support for Ukraine, 2024 will likely take one of two trajectories. Ukraine could retake the advantage by 2025, or it could start losing the war without sufficient aid.”

JUST ONE MORE AID PACKAGE DUDE, I promise just a little more military aid and Putin's done for!

For now, Ukraine is in a perilous position. The problems afflicting its military have been exacerbated since the summer. Ukrainian soldiers are exhausted by long stretches of combat and shorter rest periods. The ranks, thinned by mounting casualties, are only being partly replenished, often with older and poorly trained recruits. One Ukrainian soldier, part of a brigade tasked with holding the line southwest of Avdiivka, pointed to a video he took during training recently. The instructors, trying to stifle their laughs, were forced to hold up the man, who was in his mid-50s, just so he could fire his rifle. The man was crippled from alcoholism, said the soldier, insisting on anonymity to candidly describe a private training episode.

The shortage of troops is only one part of the problem. The other and currently more pressing issue is Ukraine’s dwindling ammunition reserves as continued Western supplies remain anything but certain. Ukrainian commanders now have to ration their ammunition, not knowing whether every new shipment might be their last. At the end of 2023, members of a Ukrainian artillery crew from the 10th Brigade sat inside a bunker nestled into a bare tree line in the country’s east, their Soviet-era 122-millimeter howitzer draped in camouflage netting and leafless branches. Only when a truck carrying two artillery shells arrived could the crew get to work for the first time in days. They quickly loaded the shells and fired toward Russian soldiers attacking Ukrainian positions three miles away. “Today we had two shells, but some days we don’t have any in these positions,” said the crew’s commander, who goes by the call sign Monk. “The last time we fired was four days ago, and that was only five shells.”

“I have two tanks, but only five shells,” said Italian, as he walked through a denuded tree line splintered by shelling about 500 yards from Russian positions in the Luhansk region. “It’s a bad situation now, especially in Avdiivka and Kupiansk.”

Even the tranche of United States-supplied cluster munitions, controversial because they harm civilians long after a war’s end, has lost some of its potency on the battlefield. “Initially in September, we could hit large groups, but now they assault in much smaller units,” said the platoon commander, who was fighting outside Bakhmut. He added that the Russians have made their trenches even deeper and harder to hit. Outside Avdiivka, where Russian forces are concentrating much of their forces in the east, the rumble of artillery on one recent afternoon was almost nonstop. It was a soundtrack not heard since the war’s earlier months, when Russian paramilitary forces assaulted Bakhmut, eventually capturing it.

Washington’s suggestion for Ukraine to go on the defensive in 2024 will mean little if Kyiv does not have the ammunition or people to defend what territory it currently holds, analysts have said.