China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpecks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, senior fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. China may not do alliances in the American sense of the term, but if we are looking at what may be China's closest partnership, Russia is probably at the top of the list. Since Putin and Xi announced a no-limits partnership together in February 2022, just a few weeks before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the importance of Sino-Russian ties have only increased. And this is particularly interesting for us at Pekingology because it's a relationship that is so heavily leader-driven. This is a story of Xi and Putin as much as it is a story of bilateral relations between the governments, and that was on display recently with yet another summit between the two men this time in Beijing, less than a week after Trump's own meetings with Xi in China. So with that said, I am really excited to be joined today by Sasha Gabliev, an expert on the Sino-Russian relationship and Russian foreign policy more broadly. Sasha is director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, and he was previously a visiting scholar with Vydoan University. Sasha, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to know, and I'm a big, big fan of Pekingology. Well, to start, hoping you can tell us a bit about yourself. How did you develop your expertise on all things China-Russia? It started with a small grant by Open Society's Foundation of George Soros that was awarded not to me, but to my mom, who was recent PhD in Russia immediately after breakup of the Soviet Union. Well, intellectuals and all of the families of intelligence have been going through a hard time, and she received a 700 US dollars grant to write a book. And she's written a book for kids about the Orthodox calendar, and that allowed her to bring me, her only child, to very cheap tour to Europe. And the first foreign country and the first big foreign city that I've seen was Vienna. Vienna is a city which is very easy to fall in love with at any age, and then I was 12th in 1997, and I wanted to become ambassador there. So I then wanted to go to a Russian diplomatic university, Mgimo, and to be an ambassador. But since my family was so traumatized about the collapse of the Soviet Union and they didn't know that Mgimo at the time at least was accessible for normal kids, for middle-class families, they thought that it's either reserved for diplomats or for people who have a lot of money, which our family was not. But there was a backdoor. There was a backdoor called School of Asian Languages, because nobody in their sane mind in the 90s wanted to learn languages of this countries that were considered backward by the Russians, were obviously very arrogant and so much focused on the West. So if you can learn Swedish, why would you learn Vietnamese or Chinese for that matter? So Mgimo had to encourage kids to go learn these tough languages and then go to this university without exam. So the deal was that I pick a language that's least repulsive and a culture that's least repulsive, pick German as my second language, and go into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and become ambassador in Vienna later on. So I started to read books, and the first book was about the biggest country in Asia, China. And just after 10 pages, I was totally beaten by China bug. I dreamt about nothing else. Again, I was 13 at that time. And then I entered Moscow State University, not Mgimo, Department of Chinese History, and was thinking about developing a career in Chinese archaeology and Asian history. So my thesis at the university, my BA thesis, was about the difference between Guo, Guo Jia, Guo He Bang, Liang Bang, the Bang, and what do they mean in bronze descriptions in Shijing, Shujing, and all of that. So relevant and topical. Yeah, very relevant and topical. But it's like investment bankers in England who get a degree in classic English literature, like Shakespeare, and they go to work for an investment bank. So I was studying this, and then I went to a newspaper called Cumber's Sunt, which is the Financial Times meets New York Times of Russia, like the best newspaper. Just to earn some pocket change to buy books about Asian China that were nowhere to be seen on the shelves of my university's library or any other library. Because again, Russia was just coming out of this era of collapse of the Soviet Union, and science, technology was underfunded. They put me to write about contemporary China. And then again, like my interest pivoted, I started to write about China. They were thinking about sending me as a first inaugural bureau chief, but then the global credit crunch came in 2008. And I became the Kremlin reporter and started to cover a lot of Russia China stories as that comes 2014. Annexation of Crimea, the censorship becomes unbearable. And then I'm looking for an intellectual home that would connect my China expertise, my inside out understanding of Russian politics with something that would be really fun and intellectually independent. And that was Carnegie Endowment. They back then had a center in Moscow, so I joined to cheer their first ever Asia program in Moscow. We had a very good run for seven years, but then the war happened. We all moved out and set up a center in Berlin, which I'm having a privilege to be a director of. That's my story. I'm sure you'll get back to the Russian Foreign Ministry on your next job coming up any moment now. Yeah, in next life, maybe. What an incredible journey. So diving into the Sino-Russian relationship, I think before 2022, when this big no limits moment happened in the relationship, a lot of people would have found it quite improbable that the two countries could overcome the longstanding points of tension in their relationship. And I mean, like quite significant tension like moments when the Russians were thinking about nuking China at various points in the Sino-Soviet split. But let's say tension in the relationship to get to a point where the two saw each other as real partners. So let's start with that friction, at least historically. What were the key difficulties in the Sino-Russian relationship? I think that was Sino-Soviet relationship, and I would set the clock for normalization back not to 2022, but actually to mid-80s, where the progress has started. And more pragmatic leaderships emerged both in the Soviet Union and in PRC with Deng Xiaoping and his disciples who held the party positions. And both the Soviets and the Chinese realized that this confrontation is not benefiting them and they need to find ways to stabilize the relationship. The tensions were born out of several factors. First, there was this long and traumatic history of relationship between Imperial China and Imperial Russia, where Russia was expanding into Siberia, coming to the Pacific in 16th and 17th, 18th century, and then bump into Qing China. There were border clashes that were not very successful for the Russians initially, but then Russia industrialized, China haven't. And Russia was very much part of the story of the century of humiliation, not as pronounced as the Brits or the French. But nevertheless, Russia was one of the eight armies that really carved out parts of China after the suppression of the Boxer rebellion. Parts of the territory that Russia annexed into itself are still scars that are visible to this day. If you go to Provincial History Museum in Heihe, you will be checked if you look white at the entrance, whether you're a Russian citizen or not. And if you're a Russian citizen, you're not allowed to come. But if you're not a Russian citizen, you come and then you see a lot of exhibits telling the painful story of all of the atrocities and misdeeds that Imperial Russia did to China. So I think that this memory is still there. It's a little bit swiped under the carpet, but it's cultivated in a form. Then came this period of Sina-Soviet romance with Stalin helping Mao Zedong and the Communists to win the Civil War in China, giving them a lot of weapons sized from Japanese Quantum Army, providing a lot of advice, a lot of financial assistance, and making it a very important contribution to the Communist winning the war against Guangming-Dang. And that's where the Soviets were the backbone of Chinese industrialization and their drive to modernize. Mao realized that Stalin is the leader of the global Communist movement. He is the senior in this relationship, and I was accepted. But after Stalin's death and after the 20th Communist Party of Soviet Union Congress were Khrushchev attacked Stalin, Mao was concerned that, OK, this may come to me and I might be criticized for resurping the power. So there was this split over leadership in the global Communist movement between Khrushchev and Mao, and that's where both this geopolitical tensions, this historic memory, and tensions between the leaders started to really drive them apart. Part of that was Soviet policy towards Vietnam and India, but I think that led to the sign of Soviet split, border clashes between the Xinjiang and the Kazakh Soviet Republic, which was part of the USSR, the very famous clashes in Damansky Island. But by the 70s it was kind of bad but stable. In the mid-80s, when Andropov came to power in the Soviet Union and then Sovipin was in charge in China, the idea was that, yeah, this standoff between the two nuclear powers, sharing such a long border, is really risky and is a drain on our natural resources at the time when we want to modernize our economy. So China was starting embarking on opening up policy and really didn't want to spend as much resources on deterrence of the Soviet Union. And so was the Soviet Union later on. So I think that this path to put history to the history dustbin, resolve the territorial issue, settle for whatever border is achievable, and then move on was priority for both Communist Party of Soviet Union and Communist Party of China. And normalization started under Gorbachev and Dancyopin, the famous Gorbachev visit during Tiananmen protest in 1989, and then actually was inherited by Yeltsin and Putin in Russia. And then throughout the Yan Zemin-Hu Jintao-Hijinpin era, this direction of zero problems on the border better be not always with each other, but never against with each other was one of the foundation pillars of the relationship. So they signed Treaty of Friendship 25 years back in 2001. This started the process of demarcation of the border, and then by 2006, it was finally resolved. So this is one pillar. The second pillar is the economic interest. By and large, Russia has abundance of natural resources, but needs investment, needs markets, and needs tech. China is the exact opposite. It's a giant manufacturing economy, technological powerhouse. The pockets are really deep, but China requires natural resources. So this is a match made in heaven. Well, and three, then the secret sauce is also joint animosity towards the United States, suspicion that the United States wants to put China and Russia down, prevent a rise as a powerful nation in the 21st century, and suspicions that the United States is fermenting color revolution, promoting democracy, and trying to undermine these regimes. So I think that these three pillars really drive Russia and China much closer together. And then final point, they don't have really reasons for criticizing each other's domestic politics. Well, both are democracies by definition of their constitution. There is a socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics. That's right. That's the correct English translation. And then Russia has a democracy where Vladimir Putin is the president no matter what. But neither is a democracy even in an American size, not to speak about Germany or other countries. So who killed Alexei Navalny or what's happening in Xinjiang couldn't bother them less. And that removes a lot of irritants. There might be no trust, no deep trust necessarily, but at least this lack of public criticism is something that also helps and provides a lot of glue when the two systems talk to each other. It's a great point. It often seems like from the Chinese side, the Russia relationship is viewed as much of a question of domestic stability as international affairs. Like it's not just about Russia. It's about Putin's Russia and the political system that goes along with that, providing something of a buffer for Xi as he thinks about stability and regime security. And I think maybe that's part of why it often looks like this is a relationship that is so leader driven, where Putin and Xi seem to really drive. And most recently they met in Beijing this May and Xi has taken only, I think, three international trips over the past year and one of them was to Moscow. So when you're looking at these summits at the two leaders engaging together today, what do you look for to better understand the overall direction of the relationship now that they've largely put these historical irritants aside and decided to forge ahead together? Three points. One, I would push back against the notion that is oh so much leader driven. Yes, China is a much more personalistic authoritarian regime that it used to be before Xi Jinping came on board before 2017, when the rules have been changed and now, well, it's more an imperial court than the normal Politburo that we have experienced with Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin and even Deng Xiaoping and that generation. And Putin's Russia is very much similar to a very traditional Tsarist regime without calling Putin a Tsar and without formally reinstating the monarchy. So both leaders play an enormous role. However, because of these three fundamentals, the security along the border that is shared interest, China is not surrounded by countries that are eager about Chinese rice. They have a lot of concerns of their own. China has a lot of territorial disputes with many of its neighbors. So if the neighbor with whom China has the longest border and it's the largest nuclear arsenal in the world is an adversary or war still part of US-led alliance system or is friendly with the US, that's a nightmare. Well, concern about the threat from the north has been perennial to Chinese history. So here there is something that really the Chinese want to avoid. So a pragmatic stable relationship with Russia is great. And with Russia that led by a guy like Putin, who is as obsessed about the US as China is, even better. And deep down, I think, and we can talk about this, they put a lot of effort to start to connect the bureaucratic systems in a much more systematic way that it was ever before. The war in Ukraine, the sanctions have driven Russia much closer into China's arms. So the business community of Russia has to reorient towards China. It's the biggest trading partner since 2010. But as scale, like just to give you a picture, Russia is less than 4% of Chinese external trade, where China is close to 40% probably at this year. So this difference is pretty striking and Russia is a much neater partner. When we talk about the relationship and the symmetry, I guess that my comparison is an iceberg. There is this public facing part of the iceberg that's visible, that's above the water. And there is this part under the water that's actually much bigger and that's where the real action is. So you look at the documents that are signed and there are like a lot of them are MOUs, a lot of them are the same MOUs that have been signed during the previous summit, but probably there isn't just another paragraph added. A classic of Chinese diplomacy. Exactly. And it's done for the same kind of ceremonial reasons and endless long, long procedures to sign the documents in front of the leaders in Great Hall of the People that we are all familiar with. But then the underwater part is where real action frequently is. And we know, for example, that Xi Jinping came to Moscow in 2023 after the pandemic, after the first year of Russia's ugly war against Ukraine on a state visit. And that was right after his re-establishment as the PRC chairman right on the back of the party congress. So he chose to do his maiden visit to Russia, which I think is tradition for Chinese leaders since Yan Zemin, because it's the least controversial, largest neighbors, we always go to Russia, but also state visit, like the highest in the protocol hierarchy. And then he spends three days in Moscow signing just 14 documents and nothing more, but then spending a lot of time with Putin and spending a lot of time with his military top brass. And then we see that this flow of dual use goods, machine tools, everything that feeds the Russian war machine is reflected in the custom statistics. So that was the underwater part of the iceberg, the agreement that China will unlock this flow of war material to Russia staying below the threshold of providing weapons. And I guess that when I'm looking at like what's on the underwater part of the iceberg, I'm all the time looking at who is in the room. And when there are people like on the most recent trip, that was the first Deputy Minister of Defense of Russia, Vasiliy Asmakov, who is responsible for weaponry. And there is a guy who is chairing the agency that is responsible for military technical cooperation in foreign countries. So there is the small circle, Putin, Xi Jinping, couple of senior advisors, Tsai-Qi, Ding Xuxiang and others, and these two guys on the Russian side. So what should be the topic of the conversation? No documents signed. But I guess that Mil-Tak was front and center to it. So I guess just looking at who is in the room in what setting is really giving us some clues on what's been under the discussion. And then you need to post various pieces of the puzzle together, including custom statistics and all of the data that we can acquire through open source and then some leaks that Western intelligence do about the scale of the cooperation. And when we're looking at China's support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine, I think we've seen a systematic effort to provide as much as possible in terms of dual use inputs to the Russian Defense Industrial Bay, supports of a sanctions evasion, but still stopping just short of wherever China seems to calculate, they would face a real rupture, like a irreversible rupture or an unacceptable level of sanctions risk on the big banks there in the relations with the West. And so right now, what do you see Russia needing or prioritizing most from China to sustain the war effort in Ukraine? And do you think Russia's happy with what it's getting? Or is it looking for more? There are several things that Russia wants to get and is getting from China, and there are a couple of things that Russia is not getting from China. What Russia is getting, first and foremost is money. 40% of Russian imports come from China, but also more than 35% of Russian exports revenue come from China. China also gives you access to RMB as a currency that you can trade in, also with some other countries. The Russian central bank, with half of its reserved immobilized in Euroclear in Europe, is using RMB for its domestic financial policy, like all of the market interventions to prop up the rubric exchange rate when they need it and so on, is conducted in RMB. So access to currency, access to export revenues, and then access to dual use goods, machine tools, everything what Russia really needs for its military economy. Tech that is supplementing the western technology because a lot of western majors have exited the Russian market or stopped updating their equipment immediately after the full-scale invasion in 2022. And then also convenient logistics. If you want to send a tanker of the shadow fleet via the Baltics, it takes it forever to get there, given what's happening, what was happening in the Red Sea. It's just very expensive and very risky given that Ukrainians want to chase the ships now. China is just across the border, right? It's a land border, you have direct pipelines, and maritime is also much faster and safer to go to China. So this things that Russia is getting from China and that helps to keep the regime afloat with its very costly and dangerous war effort. I think that Russia has requested China to provide some ready-made weapons, and Russia would be happy to tap into the Chinese supplied missiles because China produces plenty and would be happy to get hands of Chinese armoured vehicles and many other things. But as you rightfully say, China wants to play it safe. It stays just below the threshold of western red lines in order not to land into the sanctions territory. Russia is probably unhappy about that, but it understands that China is supporting Russia not for charity, but pursuing its national interests that are fully okay with Putin continuing this war as long as China doesn't have the heat of the sanctions on it, as long as Russia is driven into China's arms with far less leverage than it used to have, and as long as the war keeps the big adversary, the United States, busy, distracted, and spending its bandwidth on containing Russia instead of addressing China. More broadly in this relationship, as Russia grows increasingly dependent on Beijing, what is China getting out of its very controversial support for Russia aside from an ideologically like-minded neighbor? Well, I guess that first thing is really the stability along the border, as we've just discussed. If Russia is a China skeptical nation or a nation that is friendly with the United States or a US ally shares intelligence about China or is allowing the US to use its airspace for civilians or even put some US intelligence or military assets on its territory, what other American allies do, that's definitely making the Chinese security predicament dangerous to a different degree. So in neutral or friendly Russia is strategically beneficial, it's a stable rear. Then comes the supply of natural resources that is big and important, that comes at discounted rates right now, and that's also happening on overland routes and not exposed to the vulnerable choke points like the Malacca Strait or Strait of Hormuz. Then there is the Russian market. Russia is not very big market, but it's still a country of roughly 147 million people and that's a market that China can easily conquer because the major competitors from Japan, South Korea, EU, the US are out of the competition as a result of sanctions. At the time when China increasingly relies on exports, it's a nice thing to have. Russia is also used to promote RMB as a global currency if you look at the swift data in terms of use of RMB as a trading currency. The recent increase is really attributed to the fact that Russia has to trade much more through RMB. 70% of Russia's China trade is settled in RMB and the trade volume in 2024 was 245 billion US, that's pretty sizable. And then finally, indeed this like-minded party not only overall but also in the UN Security Council. When Russia and China see eye-to-eye naturally on so many problems, responsibility to protect digital sovereignty on the internet, Western interference and democracy promotion, that's all where Russia and China are aligned and China doesn't feel alone when it's vetoing certain resolutions in the UN Security Council or it allows Russia to be much more vocal and take a backseat while pursuing its interests. And it seems like even as relations grew warmer, at least up until the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there were certain areas that Russia still wanted relatively to be off limits or to preserve predominant influence for itself, like thinking about Russia's ties and influence in Central Asia or presence in the Arctic or certain forms of more advanced military technology. And it seemed like traditionally, the Russians wanted to preserve their own predominance in those areas. And increasingly, whether this is a result of explicit agreements or just because of the changing nature of dependence in the relationship, China seems to be faring much better in getting a more welcoming reaction from the Russians across those areas. Would you agree with that assessment? Like where do you see the trends in those more traditionally sensitive areas of the relationship? I would agree. I would put them the issues that you mentioned in three different baskets. I think on Central Asia, I was part of this expert discussion in Russia when we were facing and it was still possible just a decade ago to think about that. I was part of Carnegie Moscow Center back then and senior official would call us in for expert roundtables to discuss this Chinese presence in Central Asia. And realization was that, okay, Russia and all of the five Central Asian states are actually pretty similar in terms of economic structure by and large. Like Russia is definitely much bigger. It has a big manufacturing sector. It has some tech, but by and large as exporters, they are commodity exporters. So all of the five stands are Russia's direct competitors. And if you put yourself in their shoes, where do you go with your exports? Well, Europe is far away and you are separated by the Caspian Sea. You don't have pipeline infrastructure going under the sea. To yourself is Iran and Afghanistan problematic countries. Good luck building pipelines through them. Russia is your big competitor. So there is only one giant country next door to your east that needs commodities that has money to pay, that has money to invest, that is okay to distributing all of the bribes and kickbacks that are needed to make it happen. And that also can bring you modern tech that you also need for your country. So the Russians realized when the discussion about how to react to Belt and Road Initiative was there and the initial reaction was very negative. Like, oh, it's a Chinese plot to steal Central Asia from us. You remember that it started with Xi Jinping's speech in Azerbaijan University in Astana. And then their realization is like, well, naturally, China will be the dominant trading partner for all of the five of these nations, dominant loan provider and dominant tech partner because Russia cannot provide that. So it's okay to accept Chinese towering economic presence in this region as long as China doesn't jeopardize the Eurasian Economic Union, this free trade block that brings together in Central Asia, Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. And Chinese are okay with that. If that's a single market, you have Poros, a very corrupt customs border between China and Kyrgyzstan, like it's fine. It's not a problem for China. And then Russia is increasingly accepting Chinese burden sharing in terms of local security, like this outpost in Tajikistan, growing military tech cooperation, because the common adversary is the United States. So both Russia and China are interested in keeping the current non-democratic regimes in their places and also keep the US and Europeans at bay. So I think that here they find a modest v vende. You are right about weapons. And then there were voices in Russia advocating for more military tech cooperation with China even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And the reasons for that is that since Russia was this supplier of most advanced technological solutions for the PLA after the Western embargo was put in place in as an aftermath of 1989, the Chinese have purchased a lot. They have, by the way, kept the Russian military industrial complex afloat because of these demand signals. But the Russians were increasingly concerned about sharing the most sophisticated tech. Well, guess what? As a result, China has pumped billions of money into its own domestic production and innovation. Like the story sounds familiar when we talk about semiconductors and chips and so on. And on the military side, China has been wildly successful. And there are just very niche capabilities where China is still interested in Russian designs and Russian solutions like quieter submarines, maybe a little bit of the next generation fighter jets, the air defense systems, but not that much. And then there were people advocating for deeper cooperation and saying we need to jump into the Chinese defense market where there is still a window of opportunity because 10, 15 years down the road, China will have systems of its own and won't need Russia. And I guess that that's partial explanation to what's happening. The other one is that Russia needs Chinese military tech now, perhaps even more that China needs Russia. And then on the Arctic, it's really the story about leverage because Russia wanted to develop its Arctic zone with multiple partners, first and foremost Western majors, Exxon Mobil, Equinor, Tata, Shell and others. But as a result of Crimean taxation and then full scale invasion of Ukraine, and then as a result of full scale invasion of Ukraine, it could not do that. So it had to increasingly rely on China. And since the Russian membership of the Arctic Council is put on ice, since Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, the Arctic predicament for Russia is that it's NATO against us. And we need to develop all of these regions and extract money and get the cash flow without Western partners. And with 40% of our budget spend on this war, so where does this money come from? Our companies are cash strapped. There is only one country that can help here, definitely for its own benefit. And that's China. So Russia has to move and give China way to go and be a bigger force in the Russian Arctic. We're almost out of time, but I want to stop where we started, which is kind of diving back into history, or at least China's and Russia's interpretation of it. Because we've seen China really doubled down over somewhat a historical narrative of its World War II victory to legitimize its claims to international leadership, to legitimize its parochial goals in Asia, like establishing control over Taiwan, marginalizing Japan, etc., in a way that feels to be almost kind of Russian inflected. And we've heard Russia's prioritization of its own narrative of war legacy for a longer time. And so wondering how do Sino-Russian relations fit into both sides' understanding of what the post-World War II order is supposed to be and what their position is within it? I guess that we see that there is this reinterpretation of China's understanding of World War II history. I don't think that this was really going beyond the patriotic anti-Japanese war of liberation. And now it's, as you say, increasingly moving into well. China was present at creation for the post-World War II order, centered around Yuan, centered around the P5, centered around veto powers, and not international rules, but the law that's in the Yuan Charter. And China was not just passive observer, but it played a major role. And we can debate whether that's true, but I think that the contribution of Chinese people by, well, absorbing a lot of Japanese offensive capacity, like the perhaps the only reason why Japan didn't open a second front against the Soviets in 1941, which Hitler really wanted to, was that they couldn't commit that many troops to fight the Soviets in Siberia, in the Russian Far East, because of China and because of constant resistance, like the amount of sacrifices of Chinese people, the casualties, and so on is also huge. So, yes, it's not that China was delivering the final blow to Imperial Japan, but it obviously played a role. And I guess that here China and Russia have this interest of, well, for Russia, it's cementing its role akin to the role of Soviet Union. And since Putin's project is very much looking into the past glory and trying to recreate it, trying to get back to the table where the big guys sit and decide the fate of their smaller neighbors, the table, by the way, no longer exists, but Putin still kind of trying to tick the clock backwards and get back to the moment where the Soviet Union was still there. I think that for China, it's just very uneasily trying to find what's the role that China wants to play in the 21st century. And then fortifying this legacy pillars is probably a helpful step into saying, okay, we're actually playing this big role and forget about our period of autarchy during the Cultural Revolution and everything. Like we were all the time invested, we were all the time the global power, the law and the rules that everybody benefited from were actually co-written by us, and that's a historical, by the way. And as America pivots somewhere becomes more inward looking and so on, we are there to carry the banner. So it's a similar interpretation of history in a way with, I guess, very different future-oriented purposes and projects. China really is thinking and contemplating how its global leadership would look like in the 21st century. Like it's very different and going to be very different from the role that the US have been playing, but what is it where Russia really wants to kind of get back to the apex of its military or geopolitical power? It's fascinating how as China tries to forge ahead into a future that it increasingly shapes and controls and Russia tries to reach back into the past to recreate a prior kind of greatness, you see, even though they're going temporally in different directions, like a profound complementarity to those two projects. Absolutely. And I think that China is just really brilliant in managing the Russian sensitivity so far. There is no love lost between the two countries, but this pragmatic interest that I think would outlive even Putin, like Russia is interested in having a stable, friendly relationship with China. Russia is interested in being able to sell commodities to China and get exposure to some Chinese tech for sure. So that's stable, and then the leverage is just so different, right, where China is rising as a global powerhouse and Russia is on self-diminishing course as a result of the war and overall quarter century of Putin's rule. And yet China manages to massage the Russian ego and keep the Russians happy about it to an extent that I really think that this is one of the most successful dimensions of Chinese foreign policy. And they also are trying to make investments into long term, opening up the borders with visa free regime. Well, that's extended to many other countries because China is interested in more tourists coming in, propping up domestic consumption. But for the Russians that now will have difficulties to travel to the European Union, have no opportunities to get education or cooperate with European scientists, which was the Russian way of doing things in modernization for centuries. Well, now for the first time in Russian history, this source of modernity is China, which is fascinating. And I see some very clever long term bets that China is putting there. And perhaps that, how deep will be this bond between society to society and how much China will be able to instrumentalize that, is really one of the most fascinating chapters in Russia-China story going forward that will have impact for the rest of the world as well. Well, we'll have to wrap there, Sasha. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Henrietta. It was a pleasure. To our listeners, you can see more of Sasha's work by checking out the Carnegie Russia page. And as always, we hope to hear what you thought of today's conversation. You can write to peckingology at csis.org. And if you haven't already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show. We will be back in your feed soon. If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts. You can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Visit csis.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog.
