President Xi Jinping has pivoted from hosting a summit with US President Donald Trump to another, just days later, with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was a landmark moment in head-of-state diplomacy, a guiding strategic principle of foreign relations under Xi’s leadership. His summit with Putin was seen by some in the West as sequential to his meetings with Trump. That is far from the reality.

China does not see a stabilised relationship with Russia – among the three major powers – only as leverage against the United States but as positive for world stability and peace. Indeed, one major development was that Xi and Putin have agreed to extend the China-Russia Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation, originally signed in 2001 and last extended in 2021.

They can be expected to continue liaising on major international issues, including in the United Nations Security Council.

Understandably, given the global energy crisis amid the war on Iran and the obstruction of oil and gas shipments in the Strait of Hormuz, the world looked to the Xi-Putin summit for news of the major energy deal under negotiation for many years. The two leaders are reported to have agreed on the key details of the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, but pricing remains undisclosed amid inflation driven by geopolitical factors.

Despite the lack of official news on the pipeline, it was the announcement of deals that set the Xi-Putin meeting apart. Days after Xi and Trump agreed on a “constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability”, a framework within which deals might be negotiated, Xi and Putin reached a raft of agreements and pledged deeper cooperation. Xi said their bilateral ties, in the 30th anniversary year of the China-Russia strategic partnership of coordination, should be “rightfully considered a model of a new type of relationship between major powers”.

Even if China may not see eye to eye with Russia on occasion, it respects its decisions. But there remains little evidence of substantial progress in narrowing the many differences between China and the US.