Are Xi and Putin in a true bromance or a marriage of convenience?

Xi Jinping has concluded his three-day meeting with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in a political encounter that experts say could have considerable significance for both world leaders.

For the Chinese president, the meeting was his first trip abroad since he was elected to an unprecedented third term, while for his Russian counterpart it represented the first visit by a foreign leader since he was charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

Amid the pageantry, pronouncements and photocalls, commentators have been weighing in on who has most to gain, and whether the pair share a genuine accord or whether Xi’s trip was, as The Washington Post said, little more than “a get-well visit to an ailing relative”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What did the papers say?

Xi and Putin “traded tributes” during “a feast of quail, venison, Siberian white salmon and pomegranate sorbet,” said CNN, as the pair “seemed to conjure [up] the anti-Western compact the US has long feared”.

The visit certainly comes at an important moment for both leaders, the broadcaster added, as Russia considers the future of its “quagmire war in Ukraine” and as Beijing continues its “emergence as a great power” with influence that “now stretches far beyond Asia”.

To assess the impact of the summit, Sky News spoke to a number of experts about the “apparently growing friendship” between the world’s largest nation and the world’s most populous nation.

Xi and Putin evidently have “a very good relationship”, security and defence analyst Prof Michael Clarke told the broadcaster. “They obviously like each other and they have met 40 different times since they both took over their countries.” Plus “they are revisionists, both trying to change world politics. They think the same and they actually like each other too.”

The visit is “a really big deal,” agreed Robert Service, emeritus professor of Russian History, St Antony’s College, Oxford. But unusually Putin finds himself in a “weaker position than he thought he would be a year ago,” Service said. “He is in the hands of the Chinese.”

Yet despite many analysts predicting Xi would use this newfound leverage to try to burnish his peacemaking credentials in the wake of his country’s success in brokering the re-establishment of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran, in the end he appeared to make little progress on furthering his 12-point “peace plan” for the Ukraine war.

Xi “made a strong show of solidarity with Putin against the West”, but “barely mentioned the Ukraine conflict”, Reuters said. He even went as far as to say that China had an “impartial position” on the war, leaving “no sign that Xi’s efforts to play the role of peacemaker had yielded results”.

What next?

Overall, China and Russia appear to have “further consolidated their bilateral relations”, said DW.com, with Xi and Putin acknowledging the importance for both sides in “jointly resisting the interference in internal affairs by external forces”.

The meeting will leave the pair “further emboldened”, the news website said, as both leaders continue to deepen their “no-limits partnership”.

But while Xi was “unsurprisingly…spared the long-table diplomacy” received by Western dignitaries who travelled to Moscow to discuss the war in Ukraine, said The Guardian’s Russian affairs reporter Pjotr Sauer, ​​observers suggested the pair’s body language revealed that it will be the Chinese president who leads the partnership in future.

Karen Leong, the managing director of Singapore-headquartered Influence Solutions, said that in one particularly telling set-piece handshake, Xi had pre-empted Putin by reaching out his hand a split-second before him. This move, she told Reuters, showed that “even though Xi is the one visiting Moscow, he is the one who is going to be taking the lead in this relationship”.