The Situation Room - May 20th

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I’m Atlas, and welcome to The Situation Room! We cover the most high impact geopolitical developments every Wednesday!

Today’s topics:

• Putin Marks 25th Trip To China For Extensive Foreign Relations & Trade Talks

• U.S. Suspends Joint Defense Board With Canada

• Bolivia Faces Nationwide Protests

Putin Marks 25th Trip To China For Extensive Foreign Relations & Trade Talks

_{By: Atlas}

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing on Tuesday evening for a two-day state visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, his 25th trip to China as president and the latest in a string of meetings designed to keep the partnership between Moscow and Beijing firmly on display.

Putin's plane was met on the tarmac by Foreign Minister Wang Yi and a military honor guard. Chinese youths in light blue shirts waved Russian and Chinese flags and chanted "Welcome, welcome, warm welcome!" as Wang walked Putin to his car. The Russian leader will stay at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, the traditional residence for visiting heads of state.

The formal program begins Wednesday morning with a welcome ceremony in Tiananmen Square, followed by talks at the Great Hall of the People. The two leaders will sit again later in the day for an informal tea session and a gala reception marking the 25th anniversary of the Sino-Russian Treaty of Friendship, signed in 2001.

The Kremlin said roughly 40 documents are expected to be signed, along with a 47-page joint statement on the partnership and a separate joint declaration on building "a new type of international relations" and a multipolar world order. Putin is traveling with a delegation that includes deputy prime ministers, ministers, and the heads of major state corporations and banks.

The Comparison With Trump

The visit lands four days after President Donald Trump departed Beijing on May 15, the first U.S. presidential visit to China in nearly a decade. Beijing's choreography of the back-to-back visits is part of the point.

In a video address released ahead of his trip, Putin said relations between Russia and China had reached "a truly unprecedented level." "The close strategic relationship between Russia and China plays a major, stabilizing role globally," he said. "Without allying against anyone, we seek peace and universal prosperity."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia had "very high expectations" for the visit. Presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said the trip had been planned since February and was unrelated to the Trump summit, but he acknowledged that it would be a "good chance to exchange views" on the U.S. president's time in Beijing.

"The Trump visit was about stabilizing the world's most important bilateral relationship; the Putin visit is about reassuring a long-standing strategic partner," said Wang Zichen of the Center for China and Globalization. "For China, these two tracks are not mutually exclusive."

Patricia Kim of the Brookings Institution noted that Xi did not extend the "old friend" language to Trump that he has used for Putin in past visits. "The Xi-Putin relationship does not require that kind of performative reassurance," she said, adding that the modest outcomes of the Trump summit "likely reassure Moscow that Xi did not strike any understanding with Trump that would materially undercut Russian interests."

Ukraine and the Pressure on Putin

Putin arrives under strain. The war in Ukraine is now in its fifth year, and Russia's territorial gains have slowed sharply. Ukrainian forces have retaken roughly 400 square kilometers of previously occupied territory since April, and Kyiv's long-range drone campaign has reached deep into Russia, including Moscow itself.

This month's Victory Day parade on Red Square was scaled back, with no ballistic missiles or tank columns on display — a visible sign that Russia's hardware remains tied up at the front. State pollster VTsIOM put Putin's approval rating at 65.6 percent in April, the lowest reading since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The government has raised the VAT by 2 percentage points to 22 percent and has reportedly approached oligarchs for additional contributions to the war effort.

Trump and Xi discussed Ukraine during last week's summit, but the U.S. president left without a public breakthrough. The Financial Times reported that Xi told Trump that Putin might come to regret the decision to invade. Both Beijing and the Kremlin denied the account.

"Xi will almost certainly brief Putin on his summit with Trump," Kim said. Natasha Kuhrt of King's College London put it more bluntly: "The likelihood of Russia prevailing in the war is far less certain. This means that Russia's value to Beijing could diminish."

Energy and the Power of Siberia 2

Trade is one area where the relationship is moving in Russia's direction. Two-way trade rose 16.1 percent in the first four months of 2026 from the same period a year earlier, after a 6.5 percent decline in 2025. Russian oil exports to China climbed 35 percent in the first quarter, according to Ushakov.

Energy is expected to dominate the working agenda. Negotiations on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which would carry Russian gas from Western Siberia into northern China, have been a recurring topic in recent meetings and may move forward this week. Trump told Fox News during his own visit that Beijing had agreed to buy more U.S. oil to feed what he called China's "insatiable" appetite for energy — a comment Moscow will want to test.

Putin said earlier this month that the two sides had reached "a very substantial step forward in our cooperation in the oil and gas sector," adding that "practically all the key issues have been agreed upon." Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in April that Russia could "compensate" for any energy shortfall China faces as the Iran war disrupts global supplies.

The Iran Question and a Multipolar Pitch

The Middle East is the area where Russian and Chinese interests are not aligned. China relies on free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has held effectively closed, to keep its imports flowing. Russia has been benefiting from the war as Western buyers turn to its energy supplies amid the disruption.

Trump told Fox News that Xi had committed during their summit not to provide Iran with military equipment. Russia, by contrast, has supplied Tehran with missile components, rocket fuel, and intelligence support since the war began in late February.

The joint declaration on a "multipolar world order" expected from Wednesday's talks is the broader framing the two governments want to project: a partnership that operates outside of, and as a counterweight to, U.S. influence. Putin has cast the relationship in those terms before. "We stand only to benefit from this, from the stability and constructive engagement between the U.S. and China," he said in his pre-arrival message. The next two days in Beijing will show how far that line can be stretched in practice..

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