HONG KONG — Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, will have more than vodka shots and gifts of ice cream to show for their warming relationship when they meet this weekend on the sidelines of a developing nations’ summit in India.
Recent months have seen greater security cooperation between Russia and China as they find common ground against the U.S. The neighboring giants last month held their first joint naval drill in the South China Sea and both have condemned U.S. plans to deploy a U.S. missile shield in South Korea. A Russian general said this week the military was working with China to counter an expansion of U.S. missile defenses, which they see as upsetting the balance between the three nuclear powers.
“The fact that both countries started to talk about joint actions on the military level is a very serious development,” said Vasily Kashin, a senior fellow of Russian Academy of Science’s Far Eastern Studies Institute. “The threat from U.S. missile defense pushes both China and Russia closer to each other. For Russia and China, the policy of containment is the containment of the U.S. first of all.”
The moves show how the rapport between Xi and Putin — as shown by frequent visits and personal gifts — has begun to foster more formal security ties. Their planned encounter on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in the Indian resort region of Goa would be their fourth this year and their 19th one-on-one meeting since Xi took power 2012. China saw a surge in Russian ice cream sales last month after Putin brought some for Xi, and Putin told China’s state broadcaster they celebrated his birthday in 2013 by drinking vodka shots “like two college students.”
The development of those ties has coincided with a decline in both nations’ relations with Washington. Russia has provided powerful backing for China’s efforts to challenge the U.S.’ longstanding security dominance in the Asian-Pacific region.
Lt. Gen. Viktor Poznikhir, of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, said computer command staff from the two countries conducted a missile-defense exercise this year to counter a successful deployment of a U.S. missile shield. “We are working together on ways to minimize possible damage to the security of our countries,” Poznikhir told a security forum in Beijing on Tuesday.
China meanwhile backed Russia’s failed United Nations resolution last weekend that would have urged a cease-fire without a halt to the bombing of Aleppo, Syria. It abstained from a competing French-drafted proposal that sought an end to airstrikes and military flights over the besieged city.
“We cannot choose our neighbors and this is a good thing,” Putin said Wednesday in Moscow at a business forum. “Over these last decades, we have developed quite unique relations of trust and mutual support.”
While the countries describe ties as the “best ever,” few expect them to forge a formal military alliance to rival the U.S.-led NATO. They share a long history of tensions, including a brief Cold War conflict on their 2,600-mile border. China, with its growing military might, long ago passed Russia economically and has been testing the limits of Moscow’s trust with expansions into former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
“I definitely think this energized cooperation is significant, but fundamentally Russia and China will put their own interests first,” said Sarah Lain, a research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute who specializes in Russia’s ties to world powers. “They will support each other on things that are of mutual interest, which is usually aimed at demonstrating an alternative power base to that of the U.S.”