RUSSIA PERSPECTIVE

Moscow, May 18, 2026. Vladimir Putin will arrive in Beijing on Tuesday at the head of a top-level delegation: five deputy prime ministers, eight full-fledged ministers, the governor of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina, as well as the CEOs of major state groups — Igor Sechin (Rosneft), Alexei Miller (Gazprom), Herman Gref (Sberbank) and Andrei Kostin (VTB), in addition to the heads of Rosatom, Roscosmos, and VEB. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized: "We don't compare with anyone in the composition of our delegations. We are developing our independent and very diverse relations with China."

According to presidential advisor Yuri Ushakov, around 40 documents are on the table for signing: 21 will be signed in the presence of the two presidents, the others will be announced during the official ceremony. These texts cover industrial cooperation, trade, transportation, construction, innovation, education, nuclear energy, and even cinema. A joint statement and a separate statement on promoting "a multipolar world" and "a new type of international relations" are also planned.

The most awaited dossier remains the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, whose route via Mongolia would allow for the transportation of 50 billion cubic meters of Russian gas per year from the Yamal Peninsula to northern China. Ushakov confirmed that the project would be "discussed in detail" and that Moscow is "determined to discuss it seriously". The negotiations on this pipeline, blocked for several months over the price issue, are one of the central economic issues of the visit.

On the geopolitical level, state-owned Russian media interpret Trump's visit to Beijing last week as a signal of the decline of American primacy. RT sees it as proof that Washington has had to "openly recognize China as an equal center of global power", a "historic break" after decades where the United States treated Beijing as a manageable rival. In this reading, the Trump-Xi summit does not threaten the Sino-Russian partnership but confirms the logic of multipolarity that Moscow has defended for years.

The Kremlin explicitly rejects any interpretation of the Putin-Xi visit as a response to Sino-American contacts. Ushakov asserts that "there is no link" with Trump's tour, the preparations having begun after a video call between the two presidents in February. China is now Russia's main commercial partner: it provides over a third of its imports and absorbs over a quarter of its exports, a mutual dependence that the 40 agreements planned are intended to deepen.