My Take | Xi welcomes a weakened Putin at SCO summit
- The Chinese president has a delicate balancing act to play between Russia and the other Shanghai Cooperation Organisation member states in Central Asia, quite a few of which feel threatened by the Russian leader – especially after Ukraine – and are not unhappy about his latest military setbacks
There is nothing like the Anglo-American mainstream media when it comes to their herd mentality. So practically every major news group has been running the same line about President Xi Jinping’s first trip abroad since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The preset news template has been “all eyes will be on” the expected meeting between Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and how far Beijing will continue with their friendship described as “without limits”. The subtext, of course, is that the pair are the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of contemporary autocracy.
A dose of reality is in order. The fact that Xi has made such a big fuss about his state visit to Kazakhstan before attending the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the Uzbek city of Samarkand has already exposed some very concrete limits to that “without limits” friendship with Russia. And that’s something the Western-centric narrative about the war in Ukraine usually overlooks.
You probably won’t know it if your daily news diet consists of reading the major English-language press. But actually, Kazakhstan, one of Moscow’s closest allies, has been sympathetic to Ukraine, often publicly. That’s key to understanding Xi’s state visit and the dynamics at the SCO summit.
Like China, Kazakhstan has followed Western sanctions against Russia, if not even more stringently. And like China, it won’t recognise the so-called “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine under Russian and pro-Russian secessionist occupation. But Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev went even further; in June, at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum at which Putin was present, Tokayev openly said so.
The Russians were understandably upset. After all, in January, Russian troops helped put down deadly riots in Kazakhstan at Tokayev’s request. It was in this context that an online message purportedly sent by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev early last month caused what a rude English slang calls an excremental storm.
In his Facebook-like Vkontakte account reportedly followed by 2.2 million people, Medvedev declared that Russia-backed breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia must be merged with Georgia and reunited as a single state with mother Russia, and that Kazakhstan was an “artificial state”.