The global financial system is in danger of fragmenting

Indeed there would be. VTB’s shop front in the City of London kept busy for years (and briefly employed your correspondent). Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 finally prompted severe enough sanctions to shutter the London office, but the business it conducted goes on, now from Moscow. In a way that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s or 2000s, when the financial order resembled a hub-and-spoke system dominated by America at the centre, VTB still pipes capital to sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Europe and Asia, avoiding Western nodes altogether. To a Muscovite banker, globalisation is not dead. It simply no longer involves America and its allies.