China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin met for the first time since their historic February 4, 2022 agreement, signed at the Winter Olympics in Beijing. They enjoyed a prolonged bilateral session in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) annual conference. Desperate geopoliticians, looking for weaknesses in the relationship to play upon, did not have a good day.
After their session, the two appeared together, and Putin opened his comments by excoriating Washington’s reckless provocations over Taiwan: “We firmly adhere to the One China principle in practice. We condemn the provocations of the United States and its satellites in the Taiwan Strait.” And, in general, the West’s “attempts to create a unipolar world have recently taken on an absolutely ugly shape and are absolutely unacceptable to the vast majority of nations on the planet.”
Hence, it is critical that “Russian-Chinese interstate cooperation can be considered a model. The foreign policy tandem between Moscow and Beijing plays a key role in ensuring global and regional stability.” This has to be “based on international law and the central role of the United Nations, and not on some rules that someone has come up with and is trying to impose on others.”
