The meetings between China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are no longer extraordinary: the meeting, which started this week, is the 40th confrontation between two “good old friends”, to use the name used this Tuesday of the Russian opposite his colleague; Since their meeting in 2010, Xi has visited Putin up to eight times in his country. The agenda is packed with the usual topics of “extending trade deals, increasing hydrocarbon supply, boosting cooperation, the classics”. But on this occasion, with Ukraine’s open wound in Europe, the war churning up the global playground and dusting off the guns in international relations, the interview between the leaders of both superpowers has the ability to mark the pulse in the geopolitical theater .
The conflict in Ukraine and all of its implications – what it means for the world order, its potential contagion to other regions (read Taiwan), the sanctions, the escalation of arms, the intense aroma of a new Cold War – are the cornerstones of the das characterizes the meeting. And China seems interested in acting in the eyes of the international community as a necessary facilitator for a very elusive ceasefire.
“On the Ukraine issue, voices are growing in favor of peace and reason,” the Chinese head of state confided to his Russian counterpart on Monday, right after their first informal contact during a three-day visit. “Most countries support easing tensions, are committed to peace talks and opposed to adding fuel to the fire,” he added, according to the official reading provided by Beijing. He also reminded him that looking back at history one realizes that “conflicts must ultimately be resolved through dialogue and negotiation”.
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The change is truly remarkable: at the first face-to-face meeting between the two after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, last September – Xi didn’t even explicitly mention the war in the former Soviet republic, according to the reading. officially. Instead, he puts it on the table at minute zero and offers to actively mediate.
The Ukraine crisis has provided China with an opportunity to offer a vision of the world in line with Xi’s numerous initiatives, with which he seeks to make international relations more at his own level and with strong appeal to many countries, particularly in the south design. Global: the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative. “Today’s world is undergoing profound changes that have not been seen in a century,” Xi summed up as a prologue in an article published in various Russian media outlets on Monday before the landing. And China, he added, can lead by example to achieve “a community with a common future for mankind.”
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Xi has arrived at the Kremlin with his homework done. He has just been re-elected president for a third and unprecedented term and is carrying under his arm a 12-point roadmap to advance the “political settlement” between Moscow and Kyiv (in fact, China doesn’t officially call it a “peace plan”) on the same way it avoids calling the conflict “war”). He also comes with a certain aura of forging a pax sinica, having managed to get Saudi Arabia and Iran to resume severe diplomatic ties in 2016 a few days ago. In this recent thaw between regional antagonists, his direct mediation is obvious: Riyadh and Tehran The deal pact was sealed in China a few weeks ago with a three-party signature that also includes Beijing. The rapprochement comes after Xi met with Saudi King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in December and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in February.
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Moscow on Tuesday for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin SPUTNIK (via Portal)
In this new context, emerging from what Xi has commonly referred to as “turbulence,” Beijing and Moscow have declared their intention to walk hand-in-hand towards a “multipolar world,” synonymous with a decreasing weight of the United States and of the west table. Both leaders have in recent days explicitly denounced what they call a Washington-led “containment policy.”
“China and Russia share the same views on the concept of hegemony, unilateral sanctions, the Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation,” says Xu Poling, director of the Russian Economic Bureau at the Institute of East European Studies, Russia and Central Asia, under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences . According to him, the meeting “has several agendas for President Xi, and the call for peace is one of them.” Both countries have established an annual visit by heads of state — in the most recent, in Beijing, three weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, they declared unconditional friendship — and these bilateral ties enjoy “diplomatic priority for China for many historical reasons.” says Xu.
But there are also differences in the diplomacy of Moscow and Beijing: “China has always taken a position of collaboration and not of confrontation with the world,” he says. And that is also reflected in his peace proposal: “[Pekín] He has his own position on the Ukraine issue, he doesn’t take sides.”
The analyst thinks it is “probable” that the war will continue. But he acknowledges the economic damage the conflict is doing to Beijing. As the war intensified, he asserts, China has found itself in a position of having to take sides and has been dragged into “dissociation” and “confrontation of the blocs,” which has hurt Washington-led initiatives like the blockade in China’s supply with semiconductors and the deterioration of the economic and commercial environment. And quoting Xi, he concludes: “In the face of all difficulties, we must cling to the hope of peace.”
From afar, the European Union, the United States and NATO are watching the development of this friendship between a country that sees the Atlantic Alliance as a “threat” (Russia) and another that is trying to “undermine the international order” ( China). ., after the most recent name of NATO’s Strategic Concept. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has openly expressed his skepticism: “The world must not be fooled by a tactical move by Russia, backed by China or any other country, to freeze the war on its own terms,” he said Monday warned .
But even from the West, the Moscow summit is being watched with a few grams of hope, or at least a hint of anticipation: Xi is one of the few left with the ability to influence Putin, and he seems to have landed where Russian capital wants it Communicate and use superiority over your colleagues.
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