There is no doubt that China is the senior partner in the relationship with Russia.
The 43rd meeting between the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, last week in Beijing underlines the growing anti-Western convergence of strategic interests between two of the world’s longest serving leaders.
The expansive agenda outlined by the two leaders demands that Delhi carefully recalibrates its own great power relations and compensates wherever necessary to blunt the negative consequences of the Sino-Russian entente.
Since he took charge of Russia in 2000, Putin has made a sustained effort to boost ties with China even as he explored a modus vivendi with the West. At the turn of the 2000s, a rising China was celebrating its special ties to the United States and Europe but found it useful to develop strong ties with Russia. Since his ascent to the top in Beijing, Xi Jinping has challenged the US primacy in Asia and doubled down on a strong partnership with Russia.
As their contradictions with the US began to deepen over the last decade, both Putin and Xi have elevated their bilateral collaboration into a comprehensive strategic partnership. On the eve of his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin travelled to Beijing to proclaim an “alliance without limits”.
Since then, Putin and Xi have surprised the Western observers who had been arguing that Russia and China can’t get too close to each other given the range of their competing regional geopolitical interests and the intensity of their stakes in economic engagement with the West.
Yet, Putin and Xi have shown that they can put their divergences aside in building a new axis rooted in their shared interest in challenging the West. The latest summit has highlighted their efforts at political coordination and mutual support on their respective national priorities — Ukraine for Russia and Taiwan for China.
Putin and Xi also denounced the US interventions in Europe and its effort to build new coalitions like the Quadrilateral Forum (in which India is a member along with Australia, Japan and the US). Putin and Xi also underlined their commitment to build a “multipolar world”.
They reaffirmed their ambition to counter American hegemony over the domain of international finance. If America has been pressing China to limit its cooperation with Russia, the usually wooden Xi thumbed his nose against Washington with a rare hug to Putin.
Delhi, like many Western chancelleries, had been betting on the thesis that Moscow and Beijing would not collaborate beyond a point. In a corollary to this thesis, Delhi has been hoping that Putin will not ignore India’s concerns in drawing too close to a China that has emerged as India’s principal external challenge. The time has come for Delhi to reexamine its Russia thesis and its corollary.
Moscow today is more dependent than ever before on Beijing, especially since Putin burned its bridges with the West in invading Ukraine. There is no doubt that China is the senior partner in the relationship with Russia. Delhi has strong reasons to worry that Putin’s support for China’s positions in the Indo-Pacific, would undermine India’s effort to build a ‘multipolar Asia’ and magnify India’s security vulnerabilities in relation to China.
