DAVID PRATT ON THE WORLD: Putin and Xi’s awkward meeting was certainly not one of equals

Putin and Xi met in person for the first time last week since the start of the war in Ukraine and the outcome of that encounter on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Uzbekistan's ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand has been the subject of careful scrutiny by diplomacy pundits. In fact, few recent meetings between world leaders have been as highly anticipated as this one. 

As always words matter immensely in such encounters and Putin’s admission that he understood that Xi had “questions and concerns” about Russia’s war in Ukraine along with his praise for China’s “balanced” position on the war only deepened the intrigue surrounding current relations between the two countries.  

But if the meeting between the two was meant to signal the strength of the relationship between Moscow and Beijing at a time of increasing animosity with the West and challenges to their agendas then that was not the impression that came across. 

The bottom line here is that as Russia attempts to recover from a humiliating military rout in north-eastern Ukraine and faces growing global isolation, Xi knows he holds more cards on the leverage front over Moscow than ever before.  

On the face of it, the Chinese government has echoed Russia’s insistence that US-led Nato “encroachment” in Europe was the real trigger for the Ukraine war, but Beijing to date has only paid lip service to such a message.  

Writing recently in Foreign Affairs magazine Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace summed up the thinking of many analysts’ response to the meeting between Putin and Xi. 

“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine has forced Russia to turn to its fellow Eurasian giant, hat in hand,” wrote Gabuev.  

“China and Russia often appear as a pair, two great authoritarian powers seeking to revise the international order. But theirs is not a relationship of equals,” Gabuev said, before going on to explain how Beijing’s dominance in its relationship with Moscow is only likely to increase as the war in Ukraine deepens. 

Even the timing of the meeting played out against Putin and in Xi’s favour. For Putin it came as the Russian leader is under tremendous domestic political pressure with battlefield setbacks in Ukraine and uncertainty over Russia’s ultimate objectives there. For Xi on the other hand the timing could not have been better giving him precisely the push in prestige he wanted for an internal audience just weeks ahead of a Chinese Communist Party congress at which he will secure an unprecedented third term in power.  

In all, Putin’s woes suit China’s long-term interests say many analysts. Among them is Philipp Ivanov, CEO of Asia Society Australia a leading business and policy think-tank dedicated to Asia. 

 “China will unapologetically use its hard-headed and self-interested policy approach to Russia’s engulfment in its most significant crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union to derive the maximum benefit for its long-term foreign-policy objectives,” was how Ivanov recently summed up Beijing’s likely approach writing in Foreign Policy magazine. 

There are other pressure points too in relations between the two nations. Both have conflicting interests for example in Central Asia, where some former Soviet republics have been unnerved by Putin’s military adventurism in Ukraine and are developing closer economic ties with China. 

Kazakhstan especially has become uncomfortable with Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and growing pressure from the Kremlin. With China having invested heavily over the years in its relations with such countries in Central Asia Beijing is not about to blow that now.  

While few doubt that cooperation between Russia and China will continue, it would be a mistake to believe that things are as they were before February this year. Since then that friendship of “no limits” has been shown to be something of a myth and when viewed from Beijing’s perspective the confines and boundaries are growing. 

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Ukraine:  Where now does the war go from here? 

Having recently returned from almost a month of covering the war in Ukraine up close, I’ve tried to step back this past week and take a broader view of where this conflict might be heading.  

It was my second visit to the country since the Russian invasion in February and so much has happened in the intervening period that the situation on the ground is scarcely recognisable compared to those early days when Russian tanks and troops were at the gates of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.  

Today though the times are no less dark for many Ukrainians who like much of the world increasingly recognise the true nature of what President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is capable of.  

Just this past week the world was presented with evidence of yet more atrocities which have become the military modus operandi of Putin’s ‘army’.  

The grim discovery of hundreds of bodies, some with their hands tied behind their backs, buried in territory recaptured from Russian forces, are echoes again of the massacres elsewhere in places like Bucha that I visited these past weeks. 

What happened in both Bucha and now Izyum in Ukraine’s northeast point again to war crimes. That the head of the pro-Russian administration which abandoned the area last week accused Ukrainians of staging the atrocities at Izyum is yet more evidence too of the delusional mindset which prevails among those who do the Kremlin’s bidding.  

And speaking of that mindset what does it say about Putin’s Russia that video evidence also surfaced last week of what appears to be one of his allies Yevgeny Prigozhin the Russian oligarch and reputed financier of the Wagner mercenaries group attempting to recruit convicts to fight in Ukraine? 

Since July it seems, Wagner has been offering prisoners sentence reductions or cash incentives to sign up to fight. In the video the recruiter who appears to be Prigozhin said that he was looking for “stormtroopers” and warned the prisoners about the dangers of indulging in alcohol and drugs on the front lines, and of what he called “marauding.” 

All wars are ugly, but this is as ugly as it gets and stands as another reminder to any who doubt the thuggish, fascist threat posed by Putin’s Russia in the guise of defending itself against “encroachment” or engaging in a so-called “denazification” of Ukraine.  As for where this war is heading, I for one don’t for a minute believe Putin’s latest claim that Russia will do everything it can to bring its war on Ukraine to an end “as soon as possible.” 

Putin may be increasingly cornered and facing limited options in response to Ukraine’s remarkable counteroffensive but his capacity to inflict more suffering and destruction remains as much a threat as ever.  

In one breath he talks of ending the war, in the next the bullying returns with the claim that “we so far have responded with restraint.” Over the past month I’ve seen what that “restraint” really means and those countless Ukrainians who have been on the receiving end of it. Make no mistake Putin will continue to bully and we in turn must do all we can to ensure that Ukraine has the capacity to resist him. 

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Pakistan: The iniquity of who suffers the consequences of climate change 

The figures are mindboggling. More than 1,400 people have died and 33 million have been displaced while 1.7million homes have been damaged. Half of the country’s cotton crop has been washed away, and this year’s wheat production could be largely written off.  

Already Pakistan’s government estimates that the floods will cost $30bn that’s 10% of the country’s GDP. Having visited Pakistan many times over the decades it’s a figure I find difficult to comprehend in terms of the country’s capacity to cope.  

The UN secretary general Antonio Guterres was right when he said after a visit last week that there are “simply no words to describe” the harm inflicted by the floods that have submerged the country during the past month. Even before this catastrophe Pakistan was a country already reeling from economic and political instability. 

As if there haven’t been warnings enough of the impact of climate change on our world here in the starkest terms is another. According to the conclusions of a rapidly conducted study of the disaster in Pakistan by 26 scientists from nine countries, as part of the World Weather Attribution group, climate change is estimated to have made the rainfall that caused the devastating flooding in the country up to 50 per cent more intense. 

The unusually hot summer also amplified the melting of Pakistan’s 7,000 glaciers that feed the Indus River, though the relative contribution of glacial meltwater to the flooding was unknown, the report said. 

What is certain though is that one third of Pakistan is under water, an area equivalent to the size of Britain. Amid this disaster there are lessons here for us all. From taking seriously the impact of climate change to taking heed of local warnings over deforestation to realising how poverty contributes to extremism and political instability in countries like Pakistan we ignore such things at our peril. 

Just recently Husain Haqqani, a former ambassador of Pakistan to the US, recently warned that Pakistan could become another Sri Lanka a nation already in dire straits.  From Pakistan’s floods to drought in China and out-of-control fires in Europe, the climate crisis is wreaking havoc on planet earth on a new scale. What we are witnessing right now in Pakistan serves as the worst kind of reminder not only of the terrible cost of climate change but also the horrific iniquity of who suffers the consequences. 

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Sweden: An election that casts the country in a different political light  

“Welcome to the repatriation train. You have a one-way ticket. Next stop, Kabul!" read a tweet from the Sweden Democrats' (SD) law and order spokesperson Tobias Andersson weeks before last Sunday’s Sept. 11 elections. 

Now though the SD a party founded in 1988 by ultranationalist extremists and neo-Nazis find themselves political kingmakers. With Social Democrat Prime Minister Magdalena resigning on Thursday, it means Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson must now try to form a new government. He cannot do so without the support of the SD, who became the second biggest party with 20.5% of the votes 

It’s perhaps not what many of us here in the UK who tend to view Sweden as a land of tolerance and openness might have expected. But then Sweden’s its politics and culture are often misunderstood by those looking inwards at a country with preconceived ideas of what it represents. It took a short period of residency there some decades ago to understand that myself. 

Not surprisingly the populist, anti-immigration party’s rise to real power has civil rights groups and many immigrants worried about what the future might hold for the country. 

The SD’s rise has come on the back of what many voters saw as failed immigration and integration policies. About 20 per cent of Sweden’s 10.5mn inhabitants are foreign-born, with some 240,000 asylum seekers having arrived during the European refugee crisis of 2014-2015. 

Tapping into anger over crime and gang shootings mostly by blaming immigrants for the violence the SD has set out a 30-point programme aimed at achieving the lowest immigration in Europe.  

This will include legislation that would make it possible to deny asylum to anyone saying they are fleeing persecution for being gay, or for changing their faith.  

Speaking to Reuters news agency last week Civil Rights Defenders, an international human rights watchdog and advocacy group based in Stockholm, said it had gone through all parties' proposals on law and order, democracy and immigration and found those from the Sweden Democrats troubling. 

“In all these areas we see proposals that restrict human rights, that weaken rule of law and undermine democracy,” Civil Rights Defender Legal Director and Deputy Executive Director John Stauffer said.  

How all this will yet play out remains to be seen. But if one thing is likely it’s that many looking in on Sweden from outside will almost certainly now see this Nordic nation in a very different political light.