Putin, Xi show united front amid rising tensions with US
MOSCOW — President Joe Biden may have his alliance of democracies, but as a video summit Wednesday underscored, Russia and China still have each other.
President Xi Jinping of China, facing a diplomatic boycott of this winter’s Beijing Olympics from Biden and others, secured a pledge from President Vladimir Putin of Russia that he would attend — the first national leader to do so.
Putin, facing threats of crushing Western sanctions if Russian forces attack Ukraine, heard Xi propose that Russian and China cooperate to “more effectively safeguard the security interests of both parties.”
The videoconference between Xi and Putin on Wednesday — the 37th time the two men had met since 2013, according to Xi — was both a show of solidarity between two autocrats battling Western pressure and a display of the kind of mutually beneficial, increasingly tight partnership their two countries are building.
“We firmly support each other on issues concerning each other’s core interests and safeguarding the dignity of each country,” Xi told Putin, according to reports in the Chinese state news media.
There is still plenty of friction between Russia and China, onetime adversaries that share a land border stretching more than 2,600 miles, over matters like Siberian logging and history. But on trade, security and geopolitics, they are increasingly on the same page, forming a bloc trying to take on U.S. influence as both countries’ confrontations with the United States deepen.
The two countries do not have a formal alliance. But Xi told Putin that “in its closeness and effectiveness, this relationship even exceeds an alliance,” according to a Kremlin aide, Yuri Ushakov, who briefed reporters in Moscow.
The leaders discussed forming an “independent financial infrastructure,” Ushakov said, to reduce their reliance on Western banks and their vulnerability to punitive measures from the West. And they floated a possible threeway summit with India, evidence of their broader geopolitical ambitions; Putin traveled to New Delhi to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week.
“A new model of cooperation has been formed between our countries,” Putin told Xi in televised remarks.
For Putin, the talks came at a high-stakes moment in his brinkmanship over Western influence in Ukraine.
Karen Donfried, the American assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, was in Moscow on Wednesday for talks on Ukraine. Russian officials presented her with a proposal detailing Putin’s previously stated demands that the West roll back its military support for Ukraine and rule out the expansion of the NATO alliance to include Ukraine or other countries in the region.
Western officials are alarmed by Russian troop movements near the Ukrainian border, worrying that Russia could be threatening an invasion.