Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit China this fall, in a rare trip abroad that would undermine Kremlin excuses for his absence from other high-profile summits.
“He now feels that he cannot go almost anywhere,” Dr. Sergey Radchenko, an expert in the history of Russian and Chinese relations with Johns Hopkins University, told the Washington Examiner. “He just feels it’s dangerous.”
Russian officials have worked for years to demonstrate that Western attempts to isolate the Kremlin chief could not work. A major gathering of BRICS leaders in South Africa last week might have offered such an opportunity, but Putin could not attend in person because South African officials have a treaty obligation to arrest him on behalf of the International Criminal Court. India, which hosts the G20 Leader Summit this year, does not have that requirement, but Putin’s team claimed that he is too busy for that meeting, as well.
“This decision not to go to the G20 reflects his own perception of isolation,” former Ambassador Bill Taylor, a two-time U.S. envoy to Ukraine, told the Washington Examiner. “He’s an indicted war criminal, and beyond that, he’s a butcher. He’s not stupid. He knows that people are not going to want to sit down with him. And so, he doesn’t want to be embarrassed, and thus is not going.”
The awkwardness of Putin’s position was on display over the last several days. First, he was limited to a virtual appearance at the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg last week. And then, Kremlin officials begged off accepting an invitation to New Delhi in September, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will host world leaders.
“Well, and after all, now he really has a busy schedule,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday. “And, of course, the main focus is still the special military operation. So direct travel is not on the agenda right now.”
And yet, just hours later, a report surfaced that Putin will attend Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Forum in October. “Putin has accepted the invitation … to attend the event,” according to Bloomberg, which reported the update to his calendar. “Putin hasn’t left Russia since the court in The Hague announced the warrant in March, though he has visited Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.”
Xi has functioned as Putin’s most important diplomatic bulwark throughout the war, despite Beijing’s occasional signs of discomfort with Putin’s aggression. India, which has a long tradition of partnership with Moscow going back to the Cold War, is an important customer for Russian energy exports, despite Modi’s burgeoning cooperation with the U.S. and other major Indo-Pacific democracies. Putin’s posture evoked, for Radchenko, an old Soviet saying.
“They used to say the Indians are our friends but the Chinese are our brothers,” the Cold War historian said. “He cannot put Xi Jinping and Modi on the same level. Clearly, Modi is somebody who could betray him, potentially, whereas he feels that Xi Jinping cannot betray him. So the level of trust is much higher there.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will attend the G20 summit in his stead, officials in Moscow confirmed Tuesday. It will mark his second turn as the face of the Russian government in India this year, following a March trip for the G20 foreign ministerial and the Raisina Dialogue, an annual security conference in New Delhi.
It was an uneven week for Lavrov, who was joined by China in blocking a joint G20 statement that would have acknowledged that “most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine,” an observation that would have passed muster with the other 18 members of the bloc.
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And, at the subsequent Raisina Dialogue, when he referred to the war in Ukraine as a conflict “which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us,” he was interrupted by the audience’s laughter.
“Putin can count on the Chinese to be sure that he’s not embarrassed,” Taylor said. “Whereas if he goes to the G20 — the members of the G20, many of them, are a part of the Western coalition. And people are not going to meet with him. And he will be embarrassed to be on the stage with no one talking to him.”
