Putin and Xi’s Potemkin alliance

Vladimir Putin very rarely travels abroad these days – and Xi Jinping has not met a foreign leader in person for almost two years. Yet there they were together, just before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, hailing their and their nations’ friendship and concluding $117 billion in oil and gas deals. Although they themselves avoid the word, can we yet talk of a Sino-Russian alliance? Not quite: there’s more here than meets the eye.

Certainly the focus was on amity and common interests. This had been signalled in the lead-up to the summit. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said that Moscow’s security concerns about Nato were ‘legitimate’ and needed to be ‘taken seriously and addressed.’

At Monday’s United Nations Security Council meeting, China backed Moscow’s unsuccessful bid to have a discussion of the Ukraine crisis held behind closed doors, deploring Washington’s ‘megaphone diplomacy.’

On Thursday, Putin reciprocated, extolling this ‘close and coinciding approaches to solving global and regional issues’, and taking a swipe at the US-led diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics in protest at China’s human rights record as a ‘fundamentally wrong’ attempt ‘by a number of countries to politicise sports for their selfish interests.’

It was thus no surprise that Putin and Xi rhapsodised about their ‘unprecedented’ ties, while calling on the West to abandon attempts to undermine the ‘sovereignty’ of other nations – in other words, to weigh in on what Putin may be doing with the opposition or Xi with the Uighurs.