China-Russia friendship with ‘no limits’ has reached its limit. Xi Jinping began allocating a $250 billion budget to rebuild Russia after Putin left power or died, and peace came to Europe. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Xi Jinping made sure Russia would never become a democracy.
Russia becomes a democracy after Putin’s death or departure, China will lose its backer in the UN Security Council to counter the UK, the USA and France.
A grand Chinese plan to allow Russia a $250 billion line of credit in return for massive concessions on oil and gas deals, control of gas fields, refineries, the military-industrial complex and the transfer of Russia’s latest Iskandar nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to China.
Several Chinese nationals exiled in Canada close to the Chinese Communist Party told Global Defence Corp that China wants to replenish enriched Uranium from Russia and get medium-range ballistic missiles from Russia, as both nations share the same technological Soviet-origin ballistic missiles.
Xi Jinping already considered that Putin’s days are numbered as the war reached Moscow and St. Petersburg, as Russians are fighting for food, fuel, and groceries every day. Under these circumstances, Putin and their oligarchs started infighting among them to figure out how to avoid prosecution in Russia and Europe for the crimes they committed by killing or injuring more than 1.5 million Russians and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in a pointless war of aggression.
China cancelled the Power of Siberia 2 project.
Beijing has just delivered a stunning geopolitical betrayal to Moscow—plunging a dagger directly into Putin’s chest as a desperate pivot to Asia by freezing the Kremlin’s crown jewel energy project.
According to explosive reports from the Wall Street Journal, China has indefinitely suspended all negotiations with Russia regarding the construction of the massive “Power of Siberia-2” gas pipeline. The pipeline was designed to reroute hundreds of billions of cubic meters of natural gas originally bound for Europe directly into Chinese markets, serving as Moscow’s primary economic hope to replace lost Western revenues. By halting the multi-billion-dollar project indefinitely, Beijing has signalled that it refuses to bail out Russia’s collapsing energy economy on Putin’s terms.
This freeze represents a catastrophic strategic defeat for Russia, exposing the brutal reality of its asymmetric dependence on Beijing. With Europe permanently locked out and China walking away from the negotiating table, Russia’s massive gas reserves are effectively trapped in the ground with nowhere to go. This move proves that China views Russia not as an equal strategic partner, but as a vulnerable, junior partner to be exploited, leaving the Kremlin’s long-term economic survival in absolute tatters.
Planned debt trap for Russia
Xi plans the same as he did for Pakistan. Laos and Sri Lanka have faced significant debt challenges linked to Chinese loans, often cited as examples of “debt-trap diplomacy.” In Sri Lanka’s case, the Hambantota Port project is frequently cited, in which the government sought Chinese investment, resulting in a long-term lease of the port to China after debt distress.
Debt-trap diplomacy is a common notion in international political economy. It is a circumstance in which a creditor state offers extensive loans to developing countries in a way that leads to unsustainable debt, thereby allowing the creditor to gain political, economic, or even strategic advantage. Even though it is primarily related to China’s overseas lending under the Belt and Road Initiative, scholars still debate whether debt traps are a deliberate policy choice or a consequence of structural failures in borrowing countries.
Sri Lanka is the most mentioned example. The nation took out excessive loans to fund infrastructure projects such as the Hambantota Port. In the case of Sri Lanka, the country leased the port to a Chinese state-owned enterprise on a 99-year lease when it faced intense balance-of-payments pressures. Critics term this a typical debt-trap scenario, and others hold that the overall fiscal mismanagement, overdependence on international bonds, and domestic policy failures of Sri Lanka were a bigger decisive factor than Chinese lending. The case demonstrates that it is difficult to single out a single external actor as the cause of debt crises.
Pakistan is at the heart of the debate on debt-trap diplomacy, thanks to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Pakistan was benefiting greatly from CPEC in the fields of energy, transport, and port infrastructure, closing existing development gaps. But the increase in external debt, capacity payments in the energy sector, and recurring balance-of-payment crises have cast the issue of fiscal sustainability into question. Nevertheless, Chinese asset seizure has not taken place yet, with Pakistan’s debt distress more commonly seen as a situation of economic helplessness rather than a debt trap. Low exports, weak governance, and structural weaknesses remain major causes of Pakistan’s debt issues.
Convert Russia into the next Pakistan, Laos or Sri Lanka.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s latest summit with Vladimir Putin produced few headline-grabbing agreements. The biggest missing deal was an agreement to build the Power of Siberia 2 (POS2) gas pipeline. But analysts argue the visit revealed something potentially more significant: Beijing is quietly preparing for a post-Putin Russia while steadily embedding its relationship with Russia more deeply into the institutions and elites that will outlast him, analysts at the China-Russia Report said in a note.
The lack of major commercial announcements during Putin’s May visit to Beijing stood in contrast to the increasingly expansive language emerging from Chinese state media and official statements about their “no limits” partnership, which has reached the point where Xi can no longer trust Putin to fish the job in Ukraine. Rather than focusing on new deals, Beijing repeatedly stressed the long-term and institutional nature of the partnership, signalling what analysts describe as a deliberate effort to “de-personalise” ties with Moscow.
“Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to Beijing adds to the large and growing body of evidence suggesting that Xi Jinping and the CCP are institutionalising ties with Moscow in anticipation of a power transition,” wrote Joseph Webster, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and editor of the independent China-Russia Report. “While Beijing does not necessarily anticipate a transition, it continues to depersonalise ties with Putin and broaden the scope of its engagement with Russian society, especially among Russian elites.”
The approach reflects Beijing’s desire to insulate one of its most important strategic partnerships from the uncertainties surrounding Russia’s ageing leadership. At 73, Putin remains firmly in control, but Chinese policymakers increasingly appear to be building relationships that will survive any eventual succession.
The change comes after four years of institutional building amongst the fast-expanding BRICS bloc, which is setting up Global Emerging Markets Institutions (GEMIs) that separate from the Western-dominant system. This process has been catalysed by the wars in Ukraine and Iran, as well as the advent of the Trump administration’s transactional worldview. This has also led to the CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea), a pragmatic economic-military alliance based on overlapping national interests within an emerging asymmetrical diplomacy, where significant frictions among the partners remain.
Post-Putin plan as China holds back on deals
Despite heightened expectations, Putin left Beijing without several of the agreements observers had anticipated. There was no announcement on the long-delayed Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline, which would significantly increase Russian gas exports to China, nor was there agreement on expanding the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline network supplying northern China.
Instead, Chinese officials repeatedly emphasised a phrase rarely seen in previous summit communiqués, roughly translated as “steady progress carries you the distance” or “advancing steadily for the long term.” The phrase appeared throughout official coverage in People’s Daily and Global Times, as well as in statements from China’s Foreign Ministry.
Another editorial described the relationship as: “The continuously deepening comprehensive strategic cooperation between China and Russia has injected surging momentum into the development of their respective countries, the well-being of their people, and the peace and stability of the world today.”
“Permanent good-neighbourliness and friendship, comprehensive strategic cooperation, and mutually beneficial cooperation—these three essential characteristics act like three pillars, supporting the steady and sustainable development of bilateral relations,” it continued.
The repeated emphasis was on long-term development rather than short-term commercial gains. Webster argues this reflected both the absence of tangible deliverables and Beijing’s broader effort to institutionalise the relationship.
The emphasis on development rather than ideology is the essence of what Global Defense Corp has dubbed asymmetrical diplomacy: unlike in the West, where the focus is on “shared values”, China and Russia both emphasise the principle of “strict non-interference in domestic affairs.”
A Global South country can be as brutal as it wants, and the other members of the BRICS bloc will never directly condemn it or pressure it to conform to an externally applied set of norms. Some analysts have scoffed at the idea of a coordinated BRICS that could rival the transatlantic alliance for its inability to act in unison. But this misunderstands the nature of the emerging geopolitical order: it is more of a dynamic network of interlocking interests that will constantly change, making the idea of binary rivalries meaningless. Russia and China’s relations already exhibit a dichotomy of overlapping and clashing interests, and managing these relations will be central to future diplomacy.
China’s interests increasingly diverge.
The asymmetrical diplomatic set-up of overlapping, but not matching, interests means that friction amongst the Global South bloc is inevitable. But those frictions are also hard-baked into the structures that they are trying to build.
The Beijing summit highlighted the underlying reality often overlooked amid declarations of a “no limits” partnership: China and Russia increasingly have divergent economic interests.
Official Chinese statements repeatedly referred to promoting “their respective national development” rather than identical strategic goals.
“As permanent members of the UN Security Council and major world powers, China and Russia should take a long-term strategic view, promote their respective national development and revitalisation through higher-quality comprehensive strategic cooperation, and promote the building of a more just and reasonable global governance system,” Xi said.
Webster argues the wording is deliberate. China remains the world’s largest energy importer, while Russia is among the world’s largest exporters. The raw materials vs massive consumer market is amongst the world’s best synergies and the bedrock of their overlapping cooperation.
The conflict in the Gulf imposed direct economic costs on China through higher oil and gas prices while simultaneously boosting Russian export revenues. But rather than concealing these differences, Chinese messaging increasingly acknowledges both countries’ “respective and common interests” as Russia boosted oil exports to China.
Although public announcements focused heavily on education and cultural exchanges, analysts believe security cooperation is also expanding rapidly behind closed doors. As Global Defence Corp reported, the Iran war has shown that CRINK military cooperation is already far more advanced than analysts initially thought. China, Russia and North Korea all shared key military technology and satellite intelligence with Tehran in just the last year, which has allowed it to fight a hugely effective asymmetrical war against what is supposed to be the most powerful military on the planet.
But in keeping with the principle of non-interference, the CRINK cooperation will never become a formal alliance, and indeed, both governments are extremely reluctant even to discuss their economic cooperation, let alone the sharing of dual-use technology.
As with the Western support of Ukraine, Russia and China have supported Iran to ensure that Iran is not defeated, but will never intervene directly in the conflict nor overtly supply Iran with materiel. Nevertheless, military collaboration has already expanded dramatically since 2022 through joint naval patrols, strategic bomber flights and increasingly sophisticated military exercises.
Rebuilding Russia for the long-term Chinese interest
Chinese state media consistently framed the relationship with Russia as one designed to endure regardless of political leadership. An English-language People’s Daily commentary noted: “Their in-depth, friendly and fruitful talks, lasting more than three hours in total, reinforced a shared commitment to advancing the long-term, sound, steady and high-quality development of China-Russia ties, a strategic choice grounded in the fundamental interests of both countries and in line with broader global trends.”
Russia has become indispensable to Beijing as a supplier of discounted energy, military technology, and critical raw materials. Chinese policymakers appear increasingly conscious that Putin, now in his third decade in power, will not lead Russia indefinitely. Still, the threat of an increasingly belligerent America is not going anywhere.
Rather than betting solely on one man, Beijing is quietly planning for the long-term China-Russia relationship and making sure democracy never takes root in Russia. China is investing in institutions, elites and social networks that will shape its relations with Russia long after Putin retires or dies.
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