Putin discovers limits of China’s Xi friendship

There were “no limits” to their bonds, declared the leaders of Russia and China earlier this year. More than six months, one messy invasion and a plethora of Western sanctions later, it turns out that perhaps there were a few. The slogan didn’t even appear to surface in the comments by Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin at their encounter in Central Asia.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has been in an uncomfortable spot, attempting to balance its ideological alignment with Moscow with an act of aggression by Putin that violates Chinese diplomacy’s cardinal principles of territorial integrity and non-interference. In Uzbekistan, meeting the Russian president for the first time since February, Xi showed clearly that he has no plans to resolve that ambiguity in Putin’s favor. Russia’s leader could have done with a few more strong words and a lot more economic support. He got little more than the bare minimum.
The two men met without masks — no small deal for Xi, who’s been in Covid-19 isolation since early 2020 — around a large circular table. (Doors were open to allow for circulation.) All affable enough. And Putin worked hard, acknowledging the other side’s “questions and concerns” about the invasion, noting Beijing’s “balanced position” and taking a swipe at the US over Taiwan. He talked up bilateral trade and referred to a Russia-China “foreign policy tandem.”
By contrast, Xi avoided mentioning Ukraine at all and pointedly said he would work with Russia to “inject stability and positive energy to a world in chaos.” He promised deeper practical cooperation, but gave his “old friend” — in need of export revenue, technology imports and military support — nothing to take home. In fact, specific figures were almost entirely absent.
Putin should not have been surprised. In military terms, his needs for manpower and materiel are now acute. For their part, the Chinese are happy to hold joint naval patrols with Russia, as they did on Thursday in the Pacific, but Beijing has never signaled a desire to go further.
Diplomatically, the Kremlin surely noticed that Xi agreed to meet on neutral ground, on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, a grouping with wide geographic reach intended to counter US-dominated alliances — but with no track record of achieving much of import. That should have been a hint.
Not to mention that Putin appears to be losing in Ukraine. That’s a problem for Xi. He doesn’t want Putin defeated, but weeks away from a Chinese Communist Party Congress at which he is to be anointed for an unprecedented third term, he’s not about to associate himself with failure. There’s quite enough going on at home.
Trade is where Putin might have been excused for being more hopeful. He cited bilateral statistics in his comments, and the government had signaled that a deal on a long-discussed gas pipeline — Power of Siberia 2, crucial to the eastward pivot — was close. Not even that appeared to make significant progress. As Indra Overland, who researches energy politics at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, put it to me, now was not the optimal time for China to strike a deal. Russia has further to fall. Energy revenue is already under pressure from discounts, and further sanctions, an oil price cap and a cooling global economy won’t help, as their impact filters down. As the economy weakens, Moscow’s dependence on a shrinking pool of large hydrocarbon buyers, mainly China, will only grow.
There was also no hint that China would move to balance an increasingly asymmetric relationship: Russia pours raw materials into China but struggles to import what it needs. Chinese foreign direct investment in Russia, always paltry, is likely to stay that way because the country is simply not an attractive market for private companies, says Iikka Korhonen of the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies. It is a risk not worth taking.
The Global Times, China’s often hawkish, English-language state publication, caught the dichotomy underpinning the entire encounter. China and Russia’s ties are “at their best in history,” the paper wrote, in one of several hyperbolic accounts of the day’s events.

—Bloomberg