LONDON/CHONGQING: The arrival of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing, hard on the heels of the departure of US President Donald Trump, has confirmed the Chinese capital’s status as the meeting place for the world’s most powerful leaders.
But it is also a fact that it suits Putin to stage his meeting with President Xi Jinping soon after the end of the Sino-US summit. For this timing coincidence flatters Putin’s long-held view that Russia is China’s equal partner. In its coverage of the visit, the Russian media emphasised the alleged similarity of views between Beijing and Moscow not merely on bilateral questions but also on global affairs.
And while Yuri Ushakov, President Putin’s foreign policy adviser and former Russian ambassador to the US, insisted there is “no link” between the Sino-US and Sino-Russian summits, he still cast China as the hub of a reshaped new international order in which Russia is a privileged partner, rather than just another one of Beijing’s suitors.
Russia’s state-controlled media devoted ample footage to the lavish reception ceremonies laid out for Putin in Beijing, and to an extensive programme of cultural activities designed to mark the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations and 25 years since the conclusion of a friendship treaty between the two nations.
In his opening remarks in Russian, Putin invoked an old Chinese idiom, directly translated as “one day of not seeing you feels like being apart for three autumns”, to describe the apparent closeness of his personal relationship with his Chinese counterpart.
It played into a longstanding Russian narrative about the almost historical inevitability of a Moscow-Beijing axis. The long decades of bitter animosity and military confrontations between Russia and China are by now unmentionable.
Instead, Xi pointed to the “long standing friendship” between the two countries.
While President Trump’s visit to Beijing last week was the first by an American leader since he last visited in 2017, this was Putin’s 25th official visit to China. Putin and Xi have met more than 40 times since 2013.
And while Trump left Beijing five days ago without any formal deal or press conference, Putin and Xi presided over the signing of 20 bilateral agreements in science and technology, education and the economy, among others.
Chinese state media even highlighted Putin’s meeting with a Chinese engineer, who had travelled from the central Hunan province to meet the Russian leader in Beijing.
As a child, Peng Pai was among a group of attendees invited to visit Beihai park in Beijing with Putin on his first state visit to China in 2000. A photo taken with Putin back then reportedly sparked Peng’s interest in Russia so strongly that he went to Moscow to study as an undergraduate.
‘Old friends’
The friendly relations between the two nations and the evident personal warmth between the two leaders were boosted further by recent developments.
The US-led war against Iran, with its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has reminded Beijing that, despite its extensive oil strategic reserves, China still faces major challenges in securing long-term energy supplies.
In this context, Russia remains China’s most reliable energy partner, which has given a major boost to mega cross-border pipeline projects.
The connection to China has become even more important to Russia.
China has long allowed President Putin to bypass Western-led economic sanctions, imposed in the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022. Most of the imported food and consumer goods in Russian shops come from China, a flow that allowed President Putin to shield the Russian public from the effects of the conflict.
Russia’s Ukraine grind
Putin’s problem is that the Ukraine war has now gone on for longer than Russia’s participation in World War II, and the Russian public can no longer be protected from its impact.
But recent comments by Putin that the war, now into its fifth year, may be coming to an end have raised some hopes of at least a longer-term ceasefire than the three days brokered by the Trump administration earlier in May.
Assistant Professor Ilja Viktorov at the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou told The Straits Times that “the need to coordinate (Russia’s and China’s) positions before (a possible) ceasefire in Ukraine can be the real reason behind Putin’s visit to Beijing”.
“It is possible that we are facing currently a coming upheaval in the Ukrainian war,” he said. “From that perspective, the notable in its timing meeting of Putin with Xi should not surprise.”
After Moscow raised taxes at the beginning of the year to finance a war that gobbles up roughly half of the government’s yearly budget, Russian economic output is shrinking fast.
Inflation is climbing, and business confidence is at its lowest ebb in years. Despite the unexpected windfall of billions of extra US dollars from the temporary easing of US sanctions on oil sales, the Russian treasury remains under pressure.
Empty supermarket shelves are an increasingly frequent sight, especially in Russia’s more remote cities. And to make matters worse, improvements in domestically produced drones are allowing Ukraine to hit targets deep inside Russia, thereby bringing the war to ordinary Russian homes, precisely what President Putin had always sought to avoid.
It is unlikely that the Ukrainian strikes, which hit some of Russia’s key oil refineries, will result in shortages of Russian deliveries to China. Still, Russia recorded a decline in crude oil and petroleum product exports of 480,000 barrels per day in April compared with the previous year, according to figures from the International Energy Agency.
Although Russian officials won’t say so publicly, Putin is looking to additional help from China, probably extending to new credit lines for the purchase of foodstuffs and consumer goods.
The Russian leader has to stabilise markets and reduce the current popular grumbling inside Russia. The country faces parliamentary elections in September, and although the outcome of these ballots is preordained, Putin knows that electoral campaigns are vectors for potential street protests.
China’s hard bargain
Chinese sources have categorically denied a May 19 report in London’s Financial Times, according to which President Xi had allegedly told Trump during their Beijing talks last week that the Russian leader “might end up regretting his invasion of Ukraine”.
There is no question that a majority of Chinese security analysts regard the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an ill-conceived and ill-prepared fiasco, the sort of half-baked military operation no Chinese leader would contemplate.
Yet it’s also obvious that President Xi has no intention of seeing Russia emerge as either defeated or seriously humiliated in this conflict. A Russia strong enough to pin down European and US military efforts but weak enough not to be of much use to President Trump’s global designs remains very much China’s key objective.
However, this does not prevent China from driving a hard bargain in its dealings with Russia. The East Siberia-Pacific Pipeline is currently the most important oil pipeline connecting the two countries, while in the gas sector, the Power of Siberia 1 pipeline, with a capacity of 38 billion cubic metres, is already in operation.
The “Power of Siberia 2” pipeline, intended to transport gas from the Arctic Yamal region of Russia to China, could transport an additional 50 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year to China.
But the project is very expensive, entailing the construction of a pipeline stretching through thousands of kilometres of frozen Siberian plains. For now, the Chinese and Russians have not been able to agree on how this project should be funded.
A Chinese readout did not explicitly mention this pipeline project although energy was cited as an area of cooperation between the two countries.
Furthermore, the Chinese are offering to pay the same price Russia charges its domestic customers for gas supplies, rather than the international price Moscow is demanding, which is roughly double the amount the Chinese are ready to accept.
They know only too well that the Russians are desperate to sell. Russia’s gas exports to Europe have collapsed, with state-owned energy giant Gazprom seeing shipments reportedly plunge by 44 per cent in 2025.
Still, despite all these commercial differences, the fact remains that Russian-Chinese relations have never been as close at both the political and economic levels.
And even though Beijing claims to be neutral in the Ukraine war, it will remain Russia’s most important supporter. So Putin did have plenty to celebrate in Beijing. - The Straits Times/ANN
