In May 2014, two months after Russia invaded Crimea, its energy giant Gazprom signed a £309bn contract – the largest in its history – to supply gas to China.
Over the next five years, Gazprom built a gigantic gas pipeline, the Power Of Siberia, capable of withstanding temperatures as low as -62°C. This extraordinary feat of engineering traveled 1,800 miles across the Siberian desert, from the Arctic Circle to the Chinese border.
It was formally opened to great fanfare in December 2019, and its nine ‘compressor stations’ began pumping billions of cubic meters of gas south toward China, while billions of dollars in revenue headed north. to the Kremlin coffers.
The pipeline symbolized the interconnected nature of these two very powerful autocracies.
In recent months, following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow had hoped to sign another deal with Beijing, this time for an even longer pipeline: the Power of Siberia 2.
Both China and Russia want to see a “multipolar world,” where Americans don’t make the decisions and can invade their weaker neighbors or invade their national waters without tedious consequences.
In May 2014, two months after Russia invaded Crimea, its energy giant Gazprom signed a £309bn contract – the largest in its history – to supply gas to China.
Since a series of mysterious explosions ruptured three of Russia’s four undersea Nord Stream gas pipelines to Germany in October 2022, Moscow has been unable to find a market for the 146 billion cubic meters of gas it used to pump to the EU. every year.
Gazprom recently posted its first loss in more than 20 years, with its share price plunging 5.5 percent.
But it emerged yesterday that Beijing is now playing hardball in negotiations over the supposed new link, making life difficult for Vladimir Putin.
The Chinese are trying to reduce the price they pay for Russian gas and want to commit their country to buying only a small fraction of the pipeline’s planned annual capacity. As a result, the deal has stalled.
Moscow clearly hopes for better conditions, but Kremlin strategists would do well to keep in mind the old Chinese proverb: “A person who waits for a roast duck to pop into his mouth must wait a long time.”
The truth is that China has the advantage, not only when it comes to the pipeline, but in all aspects of the relationship between these two countries.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is a cunning old fox: He knows that, with an economy 800 percent larger than Russia’s and a population ten times larger, he holds all the cards.
Russia, increasingly isolated on the international stage for its actions in Ukraine, is rapidly becoming a vassal state of China.
After last month’s summit between the two countries in Beijing, President Xi said goodbye to Vladimir Putin with a warm hug — a gesture widely interpreted as a vivid illustration of their burgeoning bromance.
But the congress held in the Chinese capital was not a meeting between equals.
In fact, the official Chinese account of the meeting did not even mention the new gas pipeline, while Putin himself simply announced – rather timidly – that “mutual interest in its implementation has been confirmed.”
After last month’s summit between the two countries in Beijing, President Xi said goodbye to Vladimir Putin with a warm hug — a gesture widely interpreted as a vivid illustration of their burgeoning bromance.
China sees Putin’s war as a useful litmus test of the West’s willingness to react to a direct attack on the existing world order, writes Neil Barnett.
But what about their mutual geopolitical interests?
More important than any pipeline agreement, however, is the desire of the two states to effect a change in the global balance of power.
Both China and Russia want to see a “multipolar world,” where Americans don’t make the decisions and can invade weaker, smaller neighbors or invade their national waters without tedious consequences.
While China pays lip service to the West’s condemnation of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, it actually sees Putin’s war as a useful litmus test of the West’s willingness to react to a direct attack on the existing world order.
As Russia’s economy is undermined by Western sanctions and its military loses thousands of troops a week in Ukraine, China is paying close attention and figuring out how, when and whether to take action against Taiwan, the breakaway republic on its territory. South coast.
Meanwhile, as Russia weakens, China only draws strength from its neighbor.
The Telegram messaging application used by the Moscow elite to gossip anonymously is full of misgivings about this situation.
What if, contrary to the Kremlin’s dark warnings about “Ukronazis” and “NATO aggression”, Ukraine and the Western powers did not pose a real threat to Russia? What if the real strategic threat to Russia emanated not from the west but from the south?
Since China ceded large tracts of Manchuria to Russia under the Peking Convention of 1860 (one of several treaties it signed in the 19th and early 20th centuries and which are now known collectively as the “unequal treaties”), it has put his eyes on the ground. lost with increasing greed.
In fact, Chinese maps still call Vladivostok by its original name, Haishenwai, and, as recently as 2020, Chinese and Russian diplomats became embroiled in a dispute because the Russians were celebrating the 160th anniversary of the port on the Sea of Japan that acquired so many years ago. .
China’s resentment is even starker because most of Russia’s natural resource wealth is located in Siberia, the Russian province that swallowed up what was once Outer Manchuria.
Around eight million people inhabit this vast, desolate space, but the two Chinese provinces immediately across the border have more than 55 million people between them. Chinese is already often heard in the Russian Far East.
While Hong Kong and Macau have been returned to China (by the United Kingdom and Portugal respectively), the 1860 convention is one of the few “unequal treaties” that has not expired, or that China has failed to renegotiate.
Now it could be Russia that begins to accept unequal treaties because China has them over a barrel.
Since the war in Ukraine began, China has been Russia’s most valuable trading partner.
In addition to supplying it with a wide range of industrial and consumer goods, Beijing has also shored up its war machine by providing it with critical components, such as machine tools and microelectronics.
In effect, Russia sells its sanctioned oil to China at a low price and then returns the cash generated by these sales to China to pay for replacements of the goods that have been sanctioned.
There can hardly be a better definition of “Client State”.
What does all this mean for the democratic world? Perhaps the most obvious point is that it is unhelpful to suggest that China is the “real threat” and Russia is a “distraction.”
The reality is that Russia is becoming a proxy and tool of China. Letting Russia go crazy is like turning on a thousand green lights for China.
We can only hope that more and more of Russia’s 147 million citizens realize that NATO is not looking to the steppe and that the Ukrainian war is an unnecessary atrocity.
If they value their sovereignty and independence, an endless war and voluntary capitulation to China is no way to preserve them.
Neil Barnett is CEO of Istok Associates Limited, a private intelligence consultancy.
