00:00Well, Tony Brenton is a former British ambassador to Russia.
00:04I asked him about the significance of this visit.
00:07Well, I think it's come out by chance, obviously.
00:11Yuri Ushakov, President Putin's chief foreign policy honcho,
00:15has been setting up the meeting as a celebration of the 25th anniversary
00:19of the splendidly named Sino-Russian Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.
00:28And then what happened was that Trump, who was scheduled to have an earlier meeting,
00:32of course, with Mr. Xi, put that off because of the war in Iran.
00:36So that suddenly took place four days before the meeting with Putin.
00:40So the timing is accidental in a way.
00:43But from the Chinese point of view, it rather usefully demonstrates
00:47the current centrality of China in the way the world works.
00:51In practical terms, how close is this relationship?
00:55They have complementary economies.
00:57Russia is largely a raw materials producer, oil, gas, various rare metals.
01:04China, by contrast, is very much a technology and industrial producer.
01:08So each has lots of demand for what the other produces.
01:11So there are lots of reasons why the relationship is strong.
01:16What is striking to my eye as a cynical old diplomat
01:18is that I've seen lots of heads of government meeting together,
01:21smiling together for the cameras,
01:22who actually don't like each other very much.
01:25My impression is that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin
01:29do actually get on personally rather well.
01:32And they find things to talk about
01:34and share not necessarily political issues,
01:37which means they've been meeting an extraordinary number of times.
01:40This is Mr. Putin's 25th visit to China.
01:44And overall, they've met 40 times altogether.
01:46So it's a quite remarkable relationship in those terms alone.
01:51What would a good visit look like when it's over?
01:55I mean, what should we look out for?
01:59A good visit will look like, first of all,
02:01agreement on the big pressing international issues,
02:05notably the Iran war,
02:07where I think that China and Russia are both appalled
02:10by what the United States is up to.
02:12But secondly, some important pieces of bilateral business,
02:16most notably progress on agreeing on the big power of Siberia 2 pipeline,
02:21which has been in the works for a long, long time.
02:23This is a gas pipeline from Russia to China,
02:27which would double Russia's ability to export gas to China.
02:30It's important economically to Russia,
02:32who are under some economic pressure at the moment
02:34because of Western sanctions.
02:37But it's also more likely to be agreed,
02:41if not at this meeting, than in the relatively near future,
02:43because suddenly supplies of energy worldwide
02:47have become much less predictable
02:50as a result of the war in Iran.
02:52So there are real hopes, I think, there,
02:54notably on the Russian side,
02:55that they'll make real progress on that.
02:58What does the rest of the diplomatic
03:00and the rest of the international community, I wonder,
03:03make of this visit?
03:04What should they make?
03:06Well, firstly, they'll be unsurprised,
03:08since, as I've said,
03:09the closeness of Chinese-Russian relations
03:11has become a permanent feature, apparently,
03:13of the international landscape.
03:15They were, well, speaking for the West,
03:17which is a bit of the international community,
03:19which I know best, there will be annoyance
03:23that real deals, continuing ability of Russia
03:27to export oil and gas to China
03:29makes the economic collapse of Russia,
03:32which in any case is not a near contingency,
03:35makes the economic collapse of Russia
03:36that much further apart
03:37and makes Russia that much more confident
03:39in its war in Ukraine.
03:40And it's important.
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