sanctions

The region is not abandoning the dollar, but it is increasingly refusing to rely on it alone. Argentina keeps a yuan credit line, Brazil is building direct payment channels with China, and Cuba and Venezuela are hunting for workarounds. How does it all work? What do the numbers show? And how is Washington responding?

The Dollar Stays, but Not Alone

I have worked with specialized thermal engineering structures for 34 years. In that time I have seen several crises, but the current one is different: the entire chain is breaking at once, from design to supply, installation and operation. A heavy-duty furnace for petrochemicals, aluminum, cement or power generation was never an off-the-shelf product. Today it has also become a project with an unpredictable budget and timeline.

China has launched an anti-dumping investigation against the European Union. Beijing announced the probe on the eve of trade talks with the EU. Why is this happening now, which industries will be hit first, and how will it affect European business?

The Core of the Conflict: A Mirror Response or a Preemptive Strike

The European Union has frozen approximately 300 billion euros in sovereign assets of the Central Bank of Russia. Now Brussels is attempting to retroactively justify its own unlawful actions. Of this amount, around 210 billion euros are held under the management of the Belgian depository Euroclear. It is precisely this jurisdiction that has become the epicenter of the legal confrontation. Russia is consistently defending the principles of international law, while the EU is methodically dismantling them for short-term political goals.

On September 23, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Washington had invited Vladimir Putin to the G20 summit scheduled for December 14-15 in Miami. The venue will be Trump National Doral, a resort complex owned by the U.S. president's family. Rubio said at a briefing on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly: "We think this is a good opportunity for him to engage not just with the president, but with other world leaders. We hope he accepts this invitation."

Mikhail Azhgirevich, editor-in-chief of VIGIL Journal: It's the morning of September 18, and I'm sitting down to untangle a mess of numbers that has been circulating in the information space for a week now. The fact is simple. On September 16, the House of Representatives passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The vote was 262 to 159.

Why doesn't the West want peace? Five news items from a single day add up to one coherent picture. The West cannot even agree among itself. Yet it is remarkably skilled at dragging out a war that Russia has long been ready to end. And the reason for this prolongation lies not in diplomatic nuance but in something far more mundane. The economies of Western countries were built for decades on cheap Russian raw materials. Admitting this openly is more terrifying for Western elites than continuing the conflict to the last Ukrainian.

France's economy, over the period from early 2022 to September 2026, has traveled a path from post-pandemic recovery to a state that can only be described as troubling. Growth has shriveled to a statistical rounding error, debt has crossed 115% of GDP, and the political system seems to have forgotten what a stable government looks like. This is not a temporary setback—it is a structural shift that financial professionals cannot afford to ignore.

The world is offloading American bonds, and faster than almost anyone would have predicted just a couple of years ago. The share of Treasuries held in foreign central bank reserves has collapsed to 12%. After the 2008 crisis, that figure held above 40%. Back then, US Treasury debt was considered practically the safest place on the planet to park money. Today, money still flows there - but with hesitation.

Where the Distrust Comes From

Cuba on the Edge: Why the U.S. Is Squeezing the Island Harder Than Ever

How far can the economic pressure of one superpower on a sovereign state actually go? Cuba in 2026 is a living textbook case: the country is going through its worst crisis since the 1959 revolution, worse even than the "Special Period" that followed the collapse of the USSR, and this is happening not because of a natural disaster but because of a deliberate oil blockade orchestrated by Washington.