Ten years ago your correspondent was fidgeting nervously in a meeting room at VTB Capital, the investment-banking arm of Russia’s second-biggest bank, just across the road from the Bank of England. During the recruitment process for a graduate job, things had taken a worrying turn. A Russian missile had shot down MH17, a passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, while it was passing over Ukraine. Plenty of Russian firms were already under Western sanctions owing to the annexation of Crimea earlier that year. Now sanctions were being ramped up, and VTB Capital’s parent bank was a prime target. Hence the fidgeting: how to ask the slightly alarming man across the table whether there would even be a VTB in a few months’ time?

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.