If, when in February Victoria Nuland infamously launched a (not so) covert campaign to replace the ruling Ukraine president oblivious to the human casualties, resulting in a civil war in east Ukraine, NATO encroachment along the borders of Russia, and a near-terminal escalation in hostilities between Ukraine, Russian, and various regional NATO members, the US intention was to provoke the Kremlin so hard that the nation with the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources would jettison the US Dollar and in the process begin the unraveling of the USD reserve currency status (as much as Jared Bernstein desires just such an outcome) it succeeded and then some. Because in the end it may have pushed not just Russia into the anti-petrodollar camp... it appears to have forced China in it as well.

According to Itar-Tass, Russia and China are discussing setting up a system of interbank transactions which will become an analogue to International banking transaction system SWIFT, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov told PRIME on Wednesday after negotiations in Beijing.



"Yes, we have discussed and we have approved this idea," he said.

But wait: wasn't it the UK's desire to force Russia out of SWIFT just two weeks ago? Why yes, and the fact that Russia is happy to do so, and on its own terms, once again shows just who has all the leverage, and who really needs, or rather doesn't, the US Dollar.

More from Tass:

Russian authorities wanted to decrease the financial market’s dependence on SWIFT since the introduction of the first U.S. sanctions, when international payment systems Visa and MasterCard denied services to some Russian banks owned by blacklisted individuals. According to Shuvalov, Russia has been also discussing establishment of an independent ratings agency with China. Concrete proposals will be made by the end of 2014, he said. As regards China’s payment system UnionPay cooperation with the yet-to-be-established Russian national payment system, Shuvalov said that UnionPay is ready for a full-scale collaboration and will provide all infrastructural capacities for that.

The conclusion will be a repeat of what we have said every single time we report on the Eurasian alliance's drift away from the petrodollar, as stated most recently two weeks ago: