MARKAND(Uzbekistan): Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met for their first face-to-face addresses since the launch of the conflict in Ukraine on Thursday, hailing their strategic ties in defiance of the West.
Sitting across from each other at two long rounded tables and adjoined by helpers, the two leaders met on the sidelines of a peak of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation(SCO) in ex-Soviet Uzbekistan.
The meeting was part of Xi’s first trip abroad since the early days of the epidemic and for Putin, a chance to show Russia has not been completely insulated despite Western sweats.
“China is willing to make sweats with Russia to assume the part of great powers, and play a guiding part to fit stability and positive energy into a world rocked by social fermentation,” Xi told Putin at the addresses.
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV also quoted Xi as saying China was willing to work with Russia to support “each other’s core interests”.
Putin took a clear spate at the United States, which has been leading sweats to support Ukraine and put warrants on Russia.
“Attempts to produce a unipolar world have lately acquired an absolutely unattractive form and are fully inferior,” Putin said.
“We largely appreciate the balanced position of our Chinese musketeers in connection with the Ukrainian extremity,” Putin told Xi while reiterating Moscow’s backing for China on Taiwan.
“We cleave to the principle of one China. We condemn the provocation of the US and their satellites in the Taiwan Strait,” Putin said after a US Senate committee on Wednesday took the first step toward Washington directly furnishing billions of bones in military aid to Taiwan.
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‘Indispensable’ to West
It was the first in-person meeting between the two leaders since Putin saw Xi in early February for the Winter Olympic Games, days before the Russian leader launched the military descent in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has touted the SCO peak in the ancient Silk Road megacity of Samarkand as showing there’s a “volition” to Western-dominated transnational institutions.
The SCO — made up of China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the ex-Soviet Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan was set up in 2001 as a political, profitable, and security organization to compete with Western institutions.
The leaders of those countries were to attend, as well as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.
Putin met the leaders of Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan before on Thursday, as well as with Raisi and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
“The Americans suppose whichever country they put warrants on, it’ll be stopped, their perception is a wrong one,” Raisi said.
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For Putin, the peak comes at an important time, as his forces face major battleground lapses in Ukraine and amid a continued Western drive to make Russia a transnational leper. For Xi, it’s an occasion to shore up his credentials as a global statesman ahead of a vital congress of the ruling Communist Party in October.
The Chinese leader also met Thursday Belarus’s tyrannizer leader Lukashenko, who was quoted by state news agency Belta as thanking Xi for China’s “serious support in these delicate times”.
Lukashenko has been escaped by Western leaders after a fierce crackdown on the opposition two times agone
and for backing Russia on Ukraine.
The main day of the SCO peak will be on Friday, with sessions involving all the attending leaders. Putin was also set to hold addresses on Friday with Erdogan and Indian premier Narendra Modi.
