Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a summit in Uzbekistan next week, Russia’s envoy to Beijing Andrey Denisov told reporters on Wednesday, according to Russian state news agency Tass.
This meeting at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit would be the first face-to-face between the two leaders. China and Russia have established a close relationship, since the latter’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.
“This summit promises to be interesting, because it will be the first full-fledged summit since the pandemic,” Denisov said, according to Tass.
“I do not want to say that online summits are not full-fledged, but still, direct communication between leaders is a different quality of discussion … We are planning a serious, full-fledged meeting of our leaders with a detailed agenda, which we are now, in fact, working on with our Chinese partners,” the diplomat said.
According to CNN, this will be the first overseas trip for Xi since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The meet happens just weeks before a major political meeting in Beijing, where he is expected to break with tradition and assume a third term in power, cementing his role as China’s most powerful leader in decades.
According to Tass, on Wednesday, China’s number three leader Li Zhanshu, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee, became the highest ranking official to leave China since 2020, when he arrived in Vladivostok to attend the Eastern Economic Forum. Li was expected to meet Putin on Wednesday.
The fact the Xi is meeting the Russian President in his first foreign trip since the pandemic signals the close relationship between the two countries.
Moscow and Beijing have become close partners in recent years as both face tensions with the West. Xi and Putin declared that the two countries had a “no limit” partnership weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Beijing has since refused to condemn the attack on Ukraine, instead repeatedly blaming NATO and the United States for the conflict.
