To see past the official agenda, you just have to look at the guest list. When the US president visited, he brought tech and finance executives. Putin’s massive delegation, however, includes five deputy prime ministers, eight ministers, regional governors, and the head of Russia’s central bank.
For Russia, China has become a critical economic lifeline. With bilateral trade topping 200 billion dollars for three straight years, Moscow is structurally dependent on Beijing for industrial machinery, electronics, and cars.
With major Russian banks cut off from Western financial systems, trade settlements in Chinese Yuan have exploded from less than 2% in 2022 to almost 30 to 40% of Russia's total trade.
Beijing, on the other hand, is buying record amounts of discounted Russian oil, over 100 million tonnes a year. At the same time, Xi is pushing for a massive new gas pipeline, the Power of Siberia 2. The maths is simple: the Chinese leader wants cheap Russian raw materials, but he cannot risk Western penalties blocking Chinese exports to valuable European markets.
However, it is worth looking who else was on the plane. Notably, Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund and Kremlin's key negotiator with Washington, hoping to leverage China’s diplomatic weight to wind down the invasion of Ukraine.
