MOSCOW/BEIJING – Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in China this week in a bid to deepen a partnership forged between the United States' two biggest strategic competitors.

Mr Putin will attend the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing from Tuesday to Wednesday, his first trip outside the former Soviet Union since the Hague-based International Criminal Court issued a warrant for him in March over the deportation of children from Ukraine.

China and Russia declared a “no-limits” partnership in February 2022, when Mr Putin visited Beijing just days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the deadliest land war in Europe since World War II.

The US casts China as its biggest competitor and Russia as its biggest nation-state threat, while US President Joe Biden argues that this century will be defined by an existential contest between democracies and autocracies.

“Over the past decade, Xi has built with Putin’s Russia the most consequential undeclared alliance in the world,” said Harvard University professor Graham Allison, who was an assistant secretary of defence under US president Bill Clinton.

“The US will have to come to grips with the inconvenient fact that a rapidly rising systemic rival and a revanchist one-dimensional superpower with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world are tightly aligned in opposing the USA.”

Mr Biden has referred to Mr Xi as a “dictator”, and has said Mr Putin is a “killer” and a leader who cannot remain in power. Beijing and Moscow have chastised the US leader for those remarks.

Since the Ukraine war, Mr Putin has mostly stayed within the former Soviet Union, though he visited Iran in 2022 for talks with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

‘No limits’?

Three decades after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, once the senior partner in the global communist hierarchy, is now considered a junior partner of a resurgent communist China under Mr Xi, China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.

Mr Putin and Mr Xi share a broad world view, which sees the West as decadent and in decline just as China challenges US supremacy in everything from quantum computing and synthetic biology to espionage and hard military power.

But Mr Xi, who leads a US$18 trillion (S$24.7 trillion) economy, must balance close personal ties with Mr Putin with the reality of dealing with the US$27 trillion economy of the US, which is still the world’s strongest military power, and the richest.

The US has warned China against supplying Mr Putin with weapons as Russia, a US$2 trillion economy, battles Ukrainian forces backed by the US and European Union.

Mr Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, said the optics of the Ukraine war made big public deals unlikely right now.

“Putin is definitely guest of honour,” Mr Gabuev said, adding that military and nuclear cooperation would be discussed.

“At the same time, I think China is not interested in signing any additional deals, at least in public, because anything that can be portrayed as providing additional cash flow to Putin’s war chest and war machine is not good at this point.”

Adding to the complexity of military cooperation is uncertainty over the fate of Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu, who has not been seen in public for more than six weeks.

The heads of Russian energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft, Mr Alexei Miller and Mr Igor Sechin, will join Mr Putin’s retinue during his visit, sources familiar with the plans have told Reuters.

Russia wants to secure a deal to sell more natural gas to China and plans to build the Power of Siberia-2 pipeline, which would traverse Mongolia and have an annual capacity of 50 billion cubic m.

It is unclear if the gas deal – particularly the price and the cost of building it – will be agreed. REUTERS