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Should be taken out of the garage again:
The Russian car brand Moskvich went bankrupt around 20 years ago
Photo: Sergei Fadeichev / imago / ITAR-TASS
After Russia invaded Ukraine, French carmaker Renault also halted business in its second largest market after Europe.
About two weeks ago, the group announced that it would be completely separating itself from its Russian business because of the war in Ukraine.
All shares in Renault Russia would be sold to the city of Moscow, and the stake in the Russian manufacturer Avtovaz would go to the Central Institute for the Development of Automobiles and Engines (Nami), as Renault Director General
Luca de Meo
(54) explained at the time.
Shortly thereafter, Moscow Mayor
Sergei Sobyanin
(63) announced in the "Moscow Times" that he wanted to resume production at Moscow's Renault plant under the historic Moskvich brand.
"We will turn a new page in the history of Moskvich in 2022."
Since the end of the Second World War, vehicles of the Moskvich brand have been built in the Soviet Union and later in Russia;
the car is something like the Russian Trabant.
But the car increasingly lost competitiveness during the Cold War, and in 2006 the car manufacturer went bankrupt.
Sobyanin now faces a problem: he has the factories and employees to build cars, but neither the materials nor the rights to the technology.
Production cannot be started without support from abroad.
As the Russian newspaper "Vedomosti" reports, help is now apparently coming from China.
As a result, Sobyanin is negotiating a possible technology partnership with the car manufacturer FAW.
According to a report by the Reuters news agency, there are also talks with the Russian truck manufacturer Kamaz, which is to continue operating the Renault plant, and the Chinese group JAC.
Both groups, JAC and FAW, are linked to international car groups in China via joint ventures.
FAW has been building vehicles together with Volkswagen and Toyota for decades, and JAC has also been working with the Germans since 2017.
The fact that the Chinese support Moscow does not seem unreasonable on a political level either.
Despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President
Xi Jinping
(68) has not yet publicly distanced himself from Kremlin boss
Vladimir Putin
(69).
Rather, China appears to be one of the beneficiaries of Western sanctions.
In the first four months of 2022, the volume of trade with Russia shot up by almost 26 percent to around 51 billion US dollars.
Beijing is also showing interest in buying more Russian oil and gas, which the West is increasingly boycotting.
The "Moskvitch 2.0", as Kremlin spokesman
Dimitri Peskov
(54) has already called it, could actually be a "Peking Car".
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