The Wall Street Journal reports on the disquieting, and tightening, kinship between the two authoritarian powers:
"China and Russia are expected Tuesday to sign a joint declaration on economic cooperation worth tens of billions of dollars, deepening trade in energy, agriculture and other fields. Trade between the two countries rose to $189 billion last year. Mr. Putin said before the visit he believes it will exceed $200 billion as early as this year....
"Putin will host a state dinner for Mr. Xi in the evening. The heads of the largest Russian companies have been invited to attend the dinner."
Attending a recently indicted war criminal's state dinner and signing a pact of greater economic "cooperation" with a militaristic aggressor are the acts of a national leader as roguishly outside the global circles of civilized behavior as Vladimir Putin himself.
Xi already has propped up Russia's mass-murdering war machine in Ukraine by buying its oil and natural gas, which has lightened the otherwise ruinously oppressive weight of Western sanctions. It appears such purchases will only increase in quantity, and thus further underwrite Putin's lethal designs.
In addition, reports the Journal, an aide to the Russian dictator said "discussions between Messrs. Putin and Xi will focus on ... military-technical cooperation." And so Western intelligence must now focus with even more intensity on the exact meaning of that cooperation. Much-needed artillery shells?
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this about the Chinese leader's visit to Moscow: "That President Xi is traveling to Russia days after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Putin suggests that China feels no responsibility to hold the Kremlin accountable for the atrocities committed in Ukraine.... It would rather provide diplomatic cover for Russia to continue to commit those very crimes."
Note that Blinken confined his remark to China's diplomacy; no further word — not yet, anyway — about military assistance from Beijing to Moscow to the immediate ground zeroes of Kherson and Kharkiv. No civilized leader would indulge Putin along those lines. But then again, no civilized leader would dine with the bloody tyrant and buy his goddamn oil.