Russia and China’s leaders will hold a meeting in Beijing later today (October 18) to discuss geopolitical issues including the Israel-Hamas war as the two sides “no limits” partnership is put to a new high-stakes test.
It will be the third meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping after they met in Beijing on February 5, 2022, just weeks before Russian troops invaded Ukraine. They met face-to-face in Uzbekistan in September last year and in Moscow in March this year.
The latest meeting comes after a Hamas terrorist attack killed about 1,400 people in Israel on October 7 while Israeli retaliatory airstrikes have killed about 2,750 people.
Both Russia and China have so far refused to condemn Hamas but urged Israel to hold its fire and talk with all related parties, including Iran, a supporter of Hamas and an ally of the two powers. Meanwhile, United States President Joe Biden will visit Israel on Wednesday.
On Tuesday morning, Putin arrived in Beijing for China’s Belt and Road Summit, which began the same day. China said it was attended by 4,000 people from 140 countries.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the Chinese and Russian top leaders will hold a meeting to exchange views on bilateral relations and other issues of mutual interest.
Chinese commentators said China and Russia will not seek to form a military alliance at the meeting and opined that a closer economic partnership would benefit both sides.
The United Nations Security Council on Monday rejected a Russian resolution, which condemned spiraling violence in the Middle East but did not single out Hamas for its attack.
The US, the United Kingdom, France and Japan voted against it while Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Gabon and Mozambique voted for it. The remaining six members of the Council abstained. The Council needed at least nine votes to pass this resolution.
A Chinese commentator using the pen name “Zhongnan Lunjian” says in a video that the US led its allies to vote down the Russian resolution, showing that it does not want to de-escalate the situation in the Middle East.
He asserted that the US does not care about the lives of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, showing a big contradiction to China’s Belt and Road initiative, which aims to benefit many developing countries.
On Sunday, China’s top diplomat Wang Yi told his Saudi Arabia counterpart Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud in a call that Israel’s actions have gone beyond self-defense. He said only if Palestinians can establish their country will the Middle East region have peace.
Putin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call on Monday that Moscow is willing to work towards “ending the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation and achieving a peaceful settlement through political and diplomatic means.”
Hamas said it welcomed Russia’s “tireless efforts aimed at stopping Israel’s aggression” against it.
On October 12, the US Congressional Commission on Strategic Posture said in a report that the US must prepare for possible simultaneous wars with Russia and China by expanding its conventional forces, strengthening alliances and enhancing its nuclear weapons modernization program.
Putin said Sunday that Russia and China were not building a military alliance while suggestions the US should prepare for a war against Russia and China were nonsense.
“The speculation that China and Russia will establish a military alliance is purely a smear campaign of the Western countries that want to promote their China threat theory,” Zhang Hong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies, told iFeng.com in an interview.
“The cooperation between China and Russia is open and transparent, aiming to achieve mutual benefits. It is a role model for relations between big nations under the principle of mutual respect,” Zhang said, adding that the two sides form a good partnership as Russia wants to explore energy markets in the Asia-Pacific while China wants to diversify its energy sources.
He said the global situation has become more and more complicated as the United States wants to polarize the world with its definitions of ideology, politics and security.
He said due to the West’s sanctions, Russia has to look to the East to seek international cooperation for itself and the Eurasian Economic Union. He said Russia can achieve its goal by participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“To maintain its hegemony, the US has been pursuing a great power game strategy. But this strategy actually means a world war,” Song Zhongping, a Chinese military commentator, told the Global Times in an interview. “Such a strategy showed the sinister intentions of the US.”
“The US cannot fight two wars at the same time, especially when it fights against big nations such as Russia and China,” he said. “It will continue to treat Russia and China as its core rivals and allocate more military resources to fight against them.”
He said the US Congress’s anti-China and anti-Russia stances fulfill the needs of the Biden administration’s diplomatic strategy.
Read: China-Russia ‘no-limit’ partnership punctured by power prices
Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3