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bne November 2023 Cover Story I 27
Russian President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honour at China’s celebration of ten years of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) held on October 17-18 in Beijing, where everyone who was anyone in the developing world attended the party.
For Xi, it was a diplomatic coup that highlights the increasingly close ties amongst the developing countries of the world, where Western powers were noticeably absent. For Putin, it was a welcome opportunity to get out of the house and go somewhere where he was welcome.
Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed his “strong personal friendship” with his Russian counterpart as the two leaders met in Beijing on the margins of China’s global infrastructure forum.
The BRI is at the core of Xi’s foreign policy and is intimately tied up with Putin’s Eurasia Economic Union (EUU), which has become core to Russia’s foreign relations and was explicitly laid out in Russia’s latest foreign policy concept earlier this year.
Despite recent efforts by the West to re-engage with Beijing, which has strong business ties to Germany and several other Western countries, Xi highlighted the “close and effective strategic coordination” with Russia.
“We are moving very confidently bilaterally,” said Putin, who was reportedly in a very good mood, pointing particularly to flourishing bilateral trade as China helps Russia to circumnavigate Western sanctions and buys its surplus oil and gas.
All of the Central Asian presidents were there. They increasingly travel as the “C5” pack and have recently been in the US, China, Russia and Berlin as a group. Most of the senior Asian leaders also attended, as did several African leaders – a total of 130 countries were represented.
However, the delegates were almost exclusively from emerging markets, including all the G20 members and the newly extended BRICS+ group. The only leaders from Europe were Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Serbian President Aleksander Vucic.
The confab highlights the growing divided between the West and the global south that is emerging in this fractured world and driven by the ideological disagreement over creating a unipolar world vs a multipolar one.
Xi and Putin
Putin arrived with a large business delegation, including Russia’s top banks and energy companies as well as half his cabinet. Economic ties are flourishing between Russia and China as sanctions have forced the Kremlin to abandon its long-standing commercial relations with Europe and turn to the East for new partners.
Xi and Putin met but notably did not mention in public the conflict that erupted in the Middle East on October 7
Both countries are keen to present themselves as the two biggest emerging markets that have the clout to represent the interests of the multipolar world to the existing hegemony dominated by the G7+ countries of the West.
And some in the West remain attracted to Russia by its mineral wealth and copious energy supplies. Vucic has been playing both sides of the fence, cutting lucrative gas supply deals for Serbia and refusing to implement sanctions. The Serbian president was even learning Russian in his spare time and is a regular visitor to Moscow.
Orban has been even closer to Putin
as Hungary is equally dependent on Russian energy and commodities. Following Donald Tusk’s epic victory in the Polish elections on October 15, Orban finds himself very isolated in Europe and naturally will look to Russia and
“The confab highlights the growing divided between the West and the global south that is emerging in this fractured world and driven by the ideological disagreement over creating a unipolar world vs a multipolar one”
when Hamas stormed southern Israel, murdering some 1,400 people on a prolonged rampage of terror attacks and taking some 150 hostage.
The Kremlin called an emergency United Nations meeting to propose a peace
plan to bring the fighting to an end,
but it failed to pass after G7 members, including the UK, the US, France and Japan, voted against it.
China has been even more reserved with observers saying Beijing has not mentioned the world “Hamas” once since the shooting started a week and a half ago.
But both leaders must be relishing the crisis, which plays directly into Putin’s hands and will improve both their positions in the global south in general and in the Middle East in particular.
China for support. Poland’s new Prime Minister-in-waiting is seen as much closer to the EU as Tusk is the former President of the European Council (from 2014 to 2019), whereas Brussels had to blackmail Orban in the recent votes for more aid to Ukraine by withholding €13bn in post-COVID relief grants.
During a conversation with Putin – his first meeting with an EU leader since Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer made a controversial trip to Moscow last April to buy gas – the Hungarian Prime Minister referred to Russia's war against Ukraine using the Kremlin’s preferred moniker of a "military operation." Orban regularly makes anti-Ukrainian statements and has said that Kyiv has missed its opportunity to join Nato as well as calling for the financial aid to Ukraine to be halved.
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