Russia’s ‘no limits’ partnership with China – as it was described when President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing in February 2022 – is under close scrutiny in the West. France’s president Emmanuel Macron expressed the prevailing view among Western observers and decision-makers when he told the French daily L’Opinion last May that Russia was effectively becoming ‘a sort of vassal state to China’. They think Russia’s international isolation since invading Ukraine has forced it into an unequal pseudo-alliance or rapprochement with China, meaning greater dependence on its powerful and intractable eastern neighbour.

The Kremlin sees things differently. There are indeed signs of frustration over economic issues, such as the timidity of Chinese high-tech companies and slow progress of negotiations on the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, which will deliver 50 billion cubic metres of gas per year from the Yamal Peninsula to China. And since Nikita Khrushchev’s split with Mao Zedong in the late 1950s. Russian leaders have never talked of the relationship in terms of an alliance; that was out of the question for two sovereign nuclear powers. Rather than an ‘eternal friendship’ (which only endured for a decade last time around), they prefer the more sober term ‘strategic partnership’.

Nevertheless, this partnership, established in 1996 and confirmed by a friendship treaty in 2001, has become a key element of Russia’s ‘pivot to the East’. It has grown steadily stronger since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and especially since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As the world ‘de-Westernises’, the Kremlin is more and more certain that it has taken the right path. It believes that China has no interest in seeing Russia defeated in Ukraine and that, unlike the West, Beijing doesn’t want to interfere in its internal affairs, let alone change its political model. <exergue|texte=The Kremlin is more and more certain that it has taken the right path. It believes that China has no (…)