Strategic Eurasianism: Xi and Putin Cement Bloc Alignment

Strategic Eurasianism: Xi and Putin Cement Bloc Alignment

Executive Summary:

• Russia’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has evolved into a functional, operational Eurasian architecture anchored in financial integration, technological cooperation, energy interdependence, and coordinated geopolitical positioning, reducing Western coercive leverage and institutionalizing parallel systems of trade and finance.
• By committing to mutual support on “core interests” and insulating cooperation from Western sanctions, the February 2022 “no limits” pact removed strategic ambiguity, tethered their war in Ukraine with the Taiwan theater conceptually, and transformed convergence into path-dependent coordination that deepened through wartime economic, military, and technological integration.
• From 2022–2025, this incipient bloc logic became operational and institutionalized. Through international platforms like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, cross-border industrial mechanisms, financial insulation frameworks, expanded energy corridors, and synchronized military activity, Beijing and Moscow accelerated bureaucratic interoperability and normalized sanctions circumvention.
• Bloc alignment, structured around durable asymmetry, is now the baseline. Russia increasingly functions as a junior escalatory actor—economically dependent on the PRC for trade, technology, and battlefield inputs—while Beijing serves as stabilizer and ballast against sanctions pressure.
• As long as confrontation with the West remains the organizing principle of both regimes, this senior–junior Eurasian axis is likely to harden rather than fragment, complicating efforts to isolate either country.

Official readouts from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) frequently emphasize that 2026 is the 30th anniversary of the PRC–Russia partnership of strategic coordination and the 25th anniversary of the PRC–Russia Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. This framing underscores continuity, but developments since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine point to something more: a shift from tactical alignment toward the construction of a more functionally integrated bloc.

This shift is visible not only at the top, but in the rapid thickening of coordination across the relationship. Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have maintained their established pattern of direct engagement, including calls on New Year’s Eve and in the opening months of the year. More telling, however, is the expansion of coordination below the leadership level. Since December 2025, the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has recorded a flurry of lower-level “consultations” (磋商) on strategic security, strategic stability, the safety of overseas citizens, Asia-Pacific affairs, bilateral relations, and various other geopolitical matters. These exchanges are also extending geographically, with recent meetings involving Russia’s director for Latin American affairs (MFA, accessed March 17). Taken together, these meetings underscore a relationship of close strategic alignment through mechanisms that are increasingly routinized, institutionalized, and global in scope.

The emerging PRC–Russia functional bloc constitutes a profound structural and normative integration that has moved relations beyond a mere “marriage of convenience.” This architecture reduces Western coercive leverage, institutionalizes parallel systems of trade and finance, and embeds Russia’s war-making capacity within a broader Eurasian framework. The evolution of the relationship was solidified at a May 8, 2025 summit in Moscow, where the signing of over 20 agreements in high-impact sectors such as artificial intelligence (AI) and digital infrastructure signaled a systematic effort to build a parallel “multipolar” order (Xinhua, May 8, 2025; China Brief, May 14, 2025). Financial system integration is a critical, if underappreciated dynamic of this integration. By early 2024, over 90 percent of bilateral trade was settled in rubles or renminbi, using a dedicated “China track” netting system specifically designed to bypass SWIFT and U.S. dollar-based oversight (Reuters, April 22, 2025). This deep coupling effectively docks the Eurasian Economic Union with the One Belt One Road initiative, creating a resilient, insulated geopolitical corridor.

The likely direction of this relationship is a partnership short of alliance that functions as a reversed version of the Cold War-era Mao–Stalin template. The PRC will increasingly act as the senior beneficiary and stabilizer, gaining strategic distraction for the West without committing its own forces, with Russia as the militarized “junior escalator” on the periphery. In this trajectory, Russia becomes increasingly dependent on Beijing for its economic survival. To an extent, this is already the case: the PRC accounts for 30–40 percent of Russian trade and provides 89 percent of its critical battlefield imports (ECFR, March 9). Despite internal Kremlin friction and hedging maneuvers, such as the February 2026 “Dmitriev Package” memo proposing a return to dollar settlements to counter growing dependence on Beijing, shared animosity toward the West and Japan appears to outweigh underlying differences in political systems and long-term interests (The Kyiv Independent, February 13). While asymmetry and mistrust persist, the relationship has hardened into a durable senior–junior structure that can be expected to remain structurally resilient through at least 2030, prioritized over lingering regional competition in Central Asia or the Arctic.

The ‘No Limits’ Pact: A Shared Escalatory Trajectory

Prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Xi–Putin era was defined by a series of high-level diplomatic upgrades that transformed a partnership of convenience into complex strategic enmeshment. This journey accelerated significantly in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea; facing Western sanctions, Russia pivoted toward the PRC, securing the massive Power of Siberia gas deal and launching a “trust-based” stage of military-technical cooperation (ICDS, April 2023). Over the following years, the leaders met nearly four times annually, building a personal rapport that led Xi to describe Putin as his “best and most intimate friend” (最好的知心朋友) (People’s Daily Online, June 5, 2019). This period saw the repeated extension of cooperation treaties and the signing of joint statements on global strategic stability, all serving as the foundation for the pact unveiled in early 2022 that framed the relationship as “a friendship with no limits, cooperation with no forbidden areas” (友好没有止境，合作没有禁区) (Xinhua; President of Russia, February 4, 2022). The bedrock of this pre-2022 alliance was a shared revisionist worldview aimed at eroding U.S. global influence and coordinating against Western-backed “color revolutions.” Both nations spent years building a parallel financial architecture, integrating critical technologies, and creating overlapping connectivity platforms to reduce reliance on maritime chokepoints and Western financial systems (China Brief, June 19, 2018).

The “no limits” pact, officially known as the “Joint Statement on New Era International Relations and Global Sustainable Development” (关于新时代国际关系和全球可持续发展的联合声明), was unveiled in February 2022 as a comprehensive strategic framework designed to erode U.S. global “hegemony” (霸权) and transition the world toward a “multipolar” (多边主义) order (Xinhua, February 4, 2022; FDD, October 11, 2022). It committed Beijing and Moscow to providing firm mutual support for each country’s “core interests”—a euphemism primarily referring to Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine and the PRC’s claims over Taiwan—while explicitly coordinating opposition to NATO expansion and U.S.-led security alliances. The pact also served as a blueprint for integration and insulation from the West in high-impact sectors such as energy, AI, and finance.

This partnership has acted as a strategic force multiplier, anchoring both regimes to a shared commitment to reshape the global distribution of power. Immediately following the pact’s announcement, the partnership focused on providing Russia with a diplomatic and economic lifeline during the initial invasion of Ukraine. Beijing publicly maintained a “balanced” position, but top officials privately expressed “understanding” of Russia’s actions, framing the invasion as a “counterattack” against NATO expansion (X/TGTM_Official, September 4, 2022). Bilateral trade jumped 30 percent in the first seven months of 2022, with the PRC overtaking Germany as the largest buyer of Russian oil (Radio Free Europe, June 26, 2022). And when Western firms exited, the PRC became the decisive enabler of Russia’s military-industrial base: semiconductor exports to Russia grew by 209 percent between March and June 2022, and contracts established the mutual hosting of ground stations for Beidou and GLONASS satellite systems to improve the targeting and guidance of weapons (TASS, September 27, 2022).

Between 2022 and 2025, the partnership evolved into a fully operational bloc. Early steps toward coordination in sensitive domains emerged alongside the PRC’s economic and strategic support. In 2022, the two countries jointly promoted strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) framework, including proposals on verification and biosafety governance, and in June 2023 held their first interagency consultations on biosecurity in Moscow, where both sides affirmed aligned positions and called for expanded coordination (Macao Times, August 2, 2022; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, June 20, 2023). By 2023, this broader alignment had become visible in wartime material terms: the majority of critical battlefield items Russia imported (as high as 89 percent) originated in the PRC, and 79 percent of all final shipments were dispatched from the PRC (including Hong Kong) (U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, November 14, 2025). The May 8, 2025 Putin-Xi summit in Moscow marked a further expansion of coordination in high-impact sectors already under U.S. scrutiny, including AI and digital infrastructure (China Brief, May 14, 2025). The two sides committed to “mutually beneficial cooperation on the Arctic route” (北极航道互利合作) and proposed a joint buildout of cross-border infrastructure to reduce dependence on maritime chokepoints. Through three separate joint statements, they positioned themselves as the legitimate “guardians” (共同维护) of the postwar order, explicitly challenging the deployment of U.S. missile defense systems and NATO expansion (MFA, May 9, [a], [b]).

Eurasian Architecture Becomes Operational

Steering the evolution of the PRC–Russia relationship, Putin and Xi have committed to coordinating through a connected mesh of multilateral institutions. They have attempted to position the SCO and the expanded BRICS members explicitly as rivals to U.S- and NATO-aligned systems. Fueled by their rewriting of World War II history in last year’s anniversary commemorations, the two sides frame their partnership as a shared mission to “maintain a correct view” of that history (坚持正确二战史观), claiming that they—and not the United States and its allies—are the legitimate guardians of the postwar international order (Qiushi, June 6, 2025).

In the second half of the year, the PRC moved to institutionalize the broad Moscow pledges. At the SCO industrial ministers meeting in Yekaterinburg, the Chinese delegation offered “practical cooperation in the industrial field” (工业领域务实合作) to wire Chinese standards and capital deeper into Eurasian supply chains. Member states approved two new frameworks, a Permanent Working Group in the Industrial Field and a dedicated organization for joint industrial exhibitions (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, July 8, 2025). In September, the 28th meeting of the PRC–Russia Economic Sub-Committee produced operational workstreams for cooperation in e-commerce, digital services, and “safeguarding the multilateral trading system” (维护 … 多边贸易体制) (Ministry of Commerce [MOFCOM], September 29, 2025). November proved a busy month, offering a string of further opportunities to strengthen ties. At the fifth meeting of the Joint Committee on the Trade and Economic Cooperation Agreement between the PRC and the Eurasian Economic Union, the two sides committed to deepening cooperation on trade remedies, standards, and government procurement; Premier Li Qiang (李强) met with his counterpart Mikhail Mishustin to advance energy and agriculture supply lines; and officials at the PRC–Russia Energy Business Forum linked Xi’s “energy power” (能源强国) agenda to deeper cooperation on cross-border pipelines and promoting “implementation of the global governance initiative in the energy sector” (全球治理倡议在能源领域落地实施), aligning with Russia’s move to ramp up crude flows to China through 2033 (MOFCOM, November 13, 2025; People’s Daily, November 18, 2025; Xinhua, November 25, 2025). Perhaps the most significant milestone in the journey to insulate their economies from financial sanctions came in December with the implementation of a new legal framework, the upgraded Bilateral Investment Treaty. This framework built on a 2006 treaty, and followed negotiations that began in 2022 (MOFCOM, December 1, 2025).

The relationship also reached new heights in security coordination, specifically targeting Japan. During the 20th Strategic Security Consultation in Moscow, foreign ministers Wang Yi (王毅) and Sergei Shoigu reached a “new consensus” (新的共识) on Japan-related issues, agreeing to continue to coordinate and cooperate in order to “resolutely curb the provocative actions of Japan’s far-right forces” (坚决遏止日本极右势力 … 的挑衅行径) and “counter attempts to revive Japanese militarism” (坚决反击 … 日本军国主义卷土重来的图谋). They also agreed to maintain “strategic communication” (战略沟通) concerning Ukraine (People’s Daily, December 3, 2025, December 4, 2025). This agreement was followed by the PLA and Russian military conducting their 10th joint strategic air patrol, solidifying joint operations near Japan as a routine feature of regional security architecture.

Bloc Alignment as the New Baseline

During the first two months of 2026, the strategic relationship between the PRC and Russia has continued to evolve in the direction of parallel order-building via security and energy integration. For Beijing, alignment with Moscow is now a structural constant and primary source of ballast against sanctions and other geopolitical containment.

By early January, PRC messaging began defending Russia-linked energy trade more explicitly, signaling Beijing’s willingness to accept secondary sanctions as a baseline risk (MFA, January 8). The two countries continue to coordinate statements that Japan’s “remilitarization” (再军事化) represented a threat to postwar international order and regional peace (Xinhua, January 15; Sputnik, February 4; MOFCOM, February 26). On January 27, the defense ministers of both countries held a high-profile video call emphasizing “deepening joint exercises, personnel training, and … promoting strategic coordination” (深化联合行动、人员培训 … 推动双方战略协作) to respond to external risks (Ministry of National Defense, January 27). In early February, the MFA stated that the two countries now maintain “highly consistent” (高度一致) positions on Japan-related issues, effectively folding the Japan theater into a unified Eurasian strategic front. They also maintained synchronization regarding nuclear arms control, with Beijing backing Russia’s position on pressuring the United States to join talks following the expiry of the nuclear arms reduction treaty commonly known as New START (MFA, February 3).

The two leaders’ symbolic video meeting on Lunar New Year (立春)—the first time their early-year call has been explicitly tied to the PRC’s cultural calendar—announced a “new blueprint” (新的蓝图) for the relationship (Xinhua, February 4). According to the Chinese readout, the call focused on the three key rhetorical pillars of shared opposition to NATO and the U.S. alliance system in Asia: defending the World War II settlement, “global strategic stability” (全球战略稳定), and the United Nations-centered order. Xi also highlighted “steady momentum” (势头稳健) in trade and economic cooperation, while Putin named specific sectors: energy, technology, and agriculture. Around the same time, Politburo standing committee member Wang Huning (玩沪宁) met with leaders of the far-right Russian Liberal Democratic Party (nominally an opposition party but de facto under the Kremlin’s control), signaling an intention to “deepen relations between Russian and PRC governments and legislative bodies” (俄中政府、立法机构深化关系) (People’s Daily, February 3).

Energy flows have remained a core interest on both sides, with cargoes from the Russian liquefied natural gas project Arctic LNG 2 continuing to reach the PRC despite external sanctions. On January 29, the National Energy Administration (NEA) met with Russian counterparts, to discuss “deepening” (深化) energy cooperation in oil, gas, and new energy (NEA, January 29). By February 16, reports indicated that the PRC’s Russian oil imports hit record levels, driven by significant discounts and sanctions-driven supply reshuffling (Reuters, February 16).

Conclusion

Beijing and Moscow have reactivated bloc logic in Eurasia. Historically characterized by hierarchical alignment, institutional coupling, and coordinated threat perception, bloc politics involves a dominant power providing economic ballast and strategic direction, while junior members supply forward pressure and absorb risk. During the Cold War, such systems were largely defined by routinized military coordination, integrated economic planning, and a narrowing of diplomatic optionality among subordinate states. The PRC–Russia relationship has now crossed that structural threshold, and exhibits the core features of bloc formation.

If this logic holds, Russia’s trajectory will increasingly resemble that of a junior bloc member; less an equal pole than a forward-deployed escalatory actor whose economic survival and industrial throughput depend on the senior partner. Like East Germany or Poland within the Soviet system, Moscow retains formal sovereignty but operates within a tightening perimeter of strategic coordination, where major energy, financial, and security decisions are nested inside a broader architecture shaped in Beijing. This new equilibrium represents a kind of durable asymmetry: a Eurasian axis in which the PRC stabilizes and systematizes, while Russia acts as a disruptor and force multiplier at the margins. This structural condition is set to deepen as long as confrontation with the West remains the organizing principle of both regimes.