Putin and Xi Jinping, not quite full-throttle friends

Projects like Power of Siberia 2 will come late and will not compensate for the closure of European pipelines. Russia loses market share and desperately needs to sell gas, much higher than China has to buy it

It will be that the friendship between Russia and China is “without limits”, but in certain relationships the limits often appear from the words that are not said. For example on gas. Before meeting with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin in an article on People’s newspaperorgan of the Communist Party of China, had defined the realization of Russian-Chinese gas pipeline Power of Siberia 2 as “deal of the century”. After the meeting with the Chinese president, Putin said that by now all the agreements with China and Mongolia, over whose territory the gas pipeline will pass, have now been completed. But the joint communiqué of the two leaders simply refers to the efforts “to carry forward the study and approval of the project”, while Xi Jinping’s final statement does not mention the pipeline. The absence clearly shows that Moscow has a desperate need to sell gas, far greater than China has to buy it.