Iran and Russia Move into Sri Lanka After China’s Belt and Road Disaster

"Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited Sri Lanka to inaugurate a hydropower plant and irrigation project, while Russia took partial control of an airport built by China – two signs that other members of the axis of tyranny are stepping in to clean up the wreckage from China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) debacles.

Sri Lanka is a prime example of a developing nation lured into ruinous debt by BRI, which tends to saddle China’s client states with loans they can never repay for infrastructure projects that prove much less profitable than promised. Sri Lanka infamously handed over control of its Hambantota Port to China in 2017 when it was unable to make its BRI loan payments.
Sri Lanka’s finances continued to crumble after China collected the port as collateral, leading to a fiscal meltdown, rolling blackouts, a fuel crisis, and food shortages.
Another notorious Chinese-funded project in Sri Lanka was the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (MRIA), a $209 million boondoggle that became operational in 2013 despite the low number of flights Sri Lanka needs to service. Forbes dubbed it “the world’s emptiest international airport”.
China apparently had little trouble convincing former President Mahinda Rajapaksa that the sleepy fishing hamlets of his hometown, Hambantota, could be fused into a gleaming ultramodern wonder city in which half of the buildings would be named after his family, if he only borrowed about five billion dollars from Chinese banks to finance his vision.
China was eager to pry strategically important Sri Lanka from its longtime partnership with nearby India and turn the island into a trade hub of the New Silk Road, China’s effort to rebuild the fabled trade route of old. Five billion dollars in loans bought Rajapaksa’s support for a while, but much of the money vanished into thin air, construction of the airport was an environmental disaster that wiped out thousands of acres of elephant habitat and disrupted bird migration routes, most of the flights announced with much fanfare at the inaugural ceremony were quickly canceled, and the facility began losing $18 million a year. Several of the few planes that tried to use the airport were grounded when migrating birds flew into their jet turbines and the military has been called out to chase away elephants and buffalo that decided to camp on the runways." Breitbart