Introduction

On February 4, 2022, during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brief visit to Beijing, he and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping gave their blessing to a joint statement. Even against the backdrop of increasingly close Sino-Russian relations, this statement raised eyebrows among seasoned experts. With its ideological underpinning—an emphasis on shared values, however vaguely construed, as well as shared interests— the statement suggested that the relationship was evolving toward something resembling an outright alliance, a scenario previously deemed improbable. China and Russia, with their divergent interests and ambitions, and potential areas of conflict in Central Asia and the Arctic, seemed best placed to maintain an alignment, with each side retaining considerable room for maneuver. Was this pragmatic alignment coming to an end, giving place to a new kind of partnership with much more tightly coordinated global postures, a partnership that, as the statement bravely proclaimed, was “without limits”? Before observers had a chance to fully digest the implications of the statement, Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. We know today that he had not shared his plans with Xi Jinping, certainly not in any concrete form. Nevertheless, Putin’s very trip to China before the start of the invasion suggested, however wrongly, a degree of coordination or at least a meeting of minds between two ruthless authoritarians who had each made their relationship a lynchpin of China’s and Russia’s foreign policies. Russia soon became mired in a conflict Putin got badly wrong while Beijing struggled to accommodate Russia’s failings and extend a helping hand to Putin without triggering Western secondary sanctions that could have a very harmful impact on China’s economic interests. When Xi Jinping turned up in Moscow in March 2023—his first visit since the invasion—the language about the partnership “without limits” conspicuously disappeared from the joint documents: reality itself seemed to be dictating limits and constraining Putin’s and Xi’s ambitions. Xi’s visit only served to highlight Russia’s deepening international isolation. Having defiantly and purposefully burned all bridges with the West, the Russian leadership appeared direly in need of friends. China—