What is truly revealing about Putin’s comments, however, is not how badly his war has gone (we already knew that), but what they reveal about Russia’s subservience to China. What started as a beautiful friendship is already sour. It was only a month before Putin’s invasion that the two countries reaffirmed this undying “friendship”. It soon became clear that Moscow had quietly informed Beijing of its intentions. This was a worrying sign for the West. Since the days of Henry Kissinger, it has been understood that we must try never to be at odds with Russia and China at the same time. Just look at a map to see why. A long-term authoritarian alliance between the two main empires of the Eurasian continent is a stomach-churning prospect. However, Ukraine’s strong resistance and possible victory complicated the picture. If, as Putin expected, Kyiv had fallen to him within days or even weeks, the Russo-Chinese pseudo-erosion could have lasted for years. Instead, with each Ukrainian breakthrough, the inevitable, unpleasant consequences of Russia’s dependence on China become clearer. “Friendship,” you see, is such a slippery word. You might think it means military aid, sanctions busting, and technology sharing, but it might turn out that your “friend” just thought it meant buying lots of cheap assets and resources from you while you’re weak. Just like the West, Russia has always tried to have a hedging strategy when it comes to foreign relations. One of Putin’s big projects over the past decade has been building pipelines to the east as well as to the west to give Russian gas more routes to market. Besides, despite rising prices, Moscow’s budget slipped into deficit in August due to the European gas embargo. Russia needs options. The first east-facing pipeline, Power of Siberia 1, began sending natural gas to China in 2019. But a deal for the second, Siberia 2, which would connect China to the same gas fields that power Europe, collapsed in 2015 after the two sides could not agree on gas prices. In February, Xi and Putin said the pipeline was back on, though it won’t start flowing until 2030. That didn’t stop Russia’s energy minister from saying this week that Siberia 2 could fully replace European exports . What he didn’t mention is that now is not a great time to negotiate. Moscow has cut off most of its natural gas to Russia without a buyer. While this is going on, Russia is a forced seller and Xi knows it. At the same time, Russia has turned into a compulsive buyer of high-tech goods. He needs equipment, semiconductors and funding to wage war. More and more places to get them are running out. China cannot afford to openly flout US sanctions because of its reliance on exports to America, but could potentially be an under-the-radar source of goods for a desperate Moscow. So far, however, Beijing doesn’t seem to be playing along. If and when it decides to do so, an important question will first have to be answered: what will Russia have to give in return? One of China’s issues over the years has been to gain greater access for its migrants, companies and investors to Siberia. In 2015, Moscow was forced to put the kibosh on a huge Chinese land lease deal in Siberia and, at the same time, imposed a language test on Chinese guest workers in the region, after furious protests over the prospect of a so-called Chinese labor “invasion”. It’s easy to see why those on the Russian side might feel threatened: just look at a map again and find the country next to the half-empty, undeveloped wilderness of Siberia that has a huge population, a huge thirst for resources, chatter of cash (for now at least) and a racist perception of her own superiority. According to a 2020 report by the Free Russia Foundation, there is already a growing industry of Russian companies acting as fronts for state-subsidized Chinese investors buying gold, oil and factories in the country, especially in the Far East, and burgeoning Chinese influence businesses in all kinds of Russian state entities. In the long run, it may well turn out that the greatest threat to Russia’s territorial integrity comes not from the West, but from the East. In fact, the only thing that really brings Russia and China together is a hatred of democratic liberalism and an unstable ideological fellowship based on a concept called the “civilization state”. This ideology, in some ways a new iteration of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” promotes the idea that freedom and human rights are ideas confined to Western civilization that are not universally applicable. Instead, each civilization is driven by its own inner logic and must pursue its own destiny. As historian Peter Eltsov puts it: “They think they are no longer nation states – they are above that.” While this sounds interesting in theory, in practice it is mainly a way to legitimize one-man rule by associating Confucius with Mao or drawing a line from the czars to Stalinism and the neo-fascist doctrine of “Eurasianism” and the Russian Orthodox Church. . But while the culture-state doctrine may seem like a unifying factor among dictators, it is more likely a recipe for conflict among them. After all, what does the intensely materialistic, atheistic doctrine of Xi Thought really have in common with Putin’s conception of Russia as the “third Rome” of Christendom – other than an expansive idea of their own exceptionalism? The democratic world cannot impose these realizations on Russia, China, or anyone else. But we could do a much better job of talking about them, loud and clear, and highlighting facts that support our view of the world. For now, Moscow has forced itself into servitude to China in record time, but there is no intrinsic reason why this position should last. If, indeed, Ukraine can hold its own and win the war, there is every reason to believe that we could eventually draw Russia into a position of neutrality in the wider competition between China and the democratic world. The best reason to think so is that it would be overwhelmingly in Russia’s interest, a fact that will become increasingly obvious – even in Moscow.
