The leader of China, Xi Jinping, said on Wednesday (15) that his country and Vladimir Putin’s Russia need to defend themselves together against the West. In a video meeting, the Chinese supported the Russian in the Ukraine crisis, and heard back shared criticisms of US military expansion in the Indo-Pacific.
The rapprochement between the heir country of the Soviet Union and the communist giant has accelerated since the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020, in view of the greater aggressiveness of Washington in its attempt to contain its adversaries.
Reports of the second videoconference between Xi and Putin this year, totaling 36 meetings since the Chinese came to power in 2012, were made indirectly by the Kremlin and the state press in Beijing.
According to them, the international situation is “very tense” and Moscow is being subjected to “very, very aggressive rhetoric” by the United States and NATO, an alliance itself immersed in its own contradictions and crisis.
This comes amid the renewed crisis in Ukraine. Putin has deployed nearly 100,000 troops near his neighbor’s border in a show of force aimed at finding a permanent solution to what he perceives as a geopolitical challenge: Kiev’s eventual accession to NATO and other Western structures.
Since 2014, eastern Ukraine has been experiencing a civil war that is now frozen. Pro-Russian rebels, spurred on by Moscow, control part of the so-called Donbass — that year, Putin had already annexed Crimea as a way to destabilize Kiev, where the Kremlin-friendly government had been overthrown and replaced by a pro-Western one.
Putin now wants written assurances from the US and NATO that the military club will not expand to the east, and that includes countries like Georgia and Moldova, which also have unfinished business with Moscow.
In a conversation with the Russian last week, US President Joe Biden had rejected that demand. On Wednesday, Russian Vice Chancellor Dmitri Riabkov presented his plan, reiterating the request and terms to prevent the installation of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe to Assistant Secretary of State Karen Donfried in Moscow.
Xi supported Putin’s claim. In exchange, he heard from his colleague the condemnation and the sharing of “negative views” on the creation of the Aukus (US-UK-Australia, the acronym of the initials in English) military alliance, sponsored by Biden as a way to put pressure on Beijing in its backyard maritime.
Russia has already been supporting Chinese demonstrations of annoyance in the region, such as joint naval exercises around Japan and joint air patrols.
In the so-called Cold War 2.0, started in 2017 in several areas by Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, China was challenged in the economy, politics and the military area. The Democrat accelerated this process, dating the independence activists in Taiwan, an island that Beijing considers its own.
The result was a huge increase in military activity around Taipei, with incursions and invasion suggestions that raised regional alarm. The US, in turn, increased the traffic of warships around China.
Returning to the European theater, also on Wednesday the new German Prime Minister, Olaf Scholz, said that Russia “would not divide Europe”, an instance apparently more rigid than that of her predecessor Angela Merkel, who over 16 years she was an opponent of Putin who always sought accommodation with the Russian.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came back to the fore when he said an invasion of Ukraine, which Putin denies intending to carry out, would be “disastrous”.
And the European Union promoted a meeting in which precisely the ex-Soviet countries that most concern the Kremlin in its quest for westernization, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, once again asked to be accepted into the bloc. For now, all rhetoric, given the paralysis of countries in the region in the crisis.
This is quite difficult, as in the case of NATO, as they are countries with great impracticalities — starting with the majority pro-Russian areas that are autonomous in their territories. Kremlin critics say Putin deliberately sabotages neighbors to keep them from joining the West.
Xi and Putin share what the Russian has called a “new model of international relations.” Skeptics see this as a defense of autocracies, but the irony is that the basis of their relationship is the promotion of values ​​of multilateralism against what the Chinese called interference by “certain international forces” — the US.
Historically, Russia and China are adversaries. They almost went to war in the 1960s, and Putin always invested in the Russian Far East, fearing Chinese influence and eventual appropriation of the region.
That said, the antagonism to the US brought the countries together, which had already increased their very significant military cooperation. Russia is still a superior nuclear power to China, despite Beijing forecasting it to be on par with the US in 2049.
Economically, the distance between countries is enormous: the Chinese have the second economy in the world, and the Russians struggle with years of difficulties. This leads to the caution of diplomats and analysts in Russia about such an alliance, as Moscow would tend to be swallowed up by Beijing.
In practice, however, the discourse is increasingly unified, and if the aim is to scare the West, it may be working. It was no accident that the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, had to answer a question last week about the possibility of a joint invasion of Taiwan and Ukraine at a press conference.
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