Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
The Russian Federation’s myopically contradictory relationship with the People’s Republic of China under President Putin is an object lesson for the rest of the world of how not to conduct foreign policy for the long term. For more than two decades, President Putin promised Russians the return of their country’s status as a great power. Yet, one of the most striking consequences of his policies is that Russia – historically one of the world’s most independent geopolitical actors – has become increasingly dependent on its powerful eastern neighbor, the People’s Republic of China.
The partnership between Moscow and Beijing is mostly presented by both governments as a strategic alliance against Western dominance. Publicly, they often share strong disagreements with the American-led international order, oppose Western criticism of their tyrannical domestic politics, and jointly work hard to establish a multipolar world. But beneath the public display of friendship lies a far more complicated reality.
The Russian Federation needs the People’s Republic of China more than the latter needs the former. In particular, after the illegal invasion of Ukraine and the resulting Western sanctions, the Russian Federation’s economic choices have narrowed dramatically. While putting up a cheerful face, President Putin’s Russia is in huge economic trouble. Revenues have shrunk from 4.9% in 2024 to about 1% in 2025, war expenditures have risen alarmingly, inflation has destroyed incomes, high interest rates have choked investments, energy dependence have perpetuated strategic vulnerability, and living conditions have been killing most Russians prematurely. The core problem is the fact that war growth is low quality growth. Official market expectations for 2026 are around 0.4-1.1%. The economy is therefore shifting from “wartime boom” to wartime disaster – way beyond wartime stagnation. Commensurately, Russia’s January-April 2026 federal deficit reached 5.8 trillion rubles, already far above the original full-year target. Today, the People’s Republic of China has become a crucial buyer of Russian energy, a supplier of goods and technology, and a diplomatic shield against complete isolation. Yet, dependence creates imbalance. The Russian Federation exports mainly raw materials; the People’s Republic of China exports manufactured goods, technology, and capital. This relationship increasingly resembles that of a resource supplier and an industrial superpower.
This imbalance carries a historical irony. For centuries, Russia expanded eastward across Siberia and into the Far East, eventually becoming a Pacific power. During the 19th century, a weakened Qing China was forced to accept treaties that transferred more than one million square kilometers north of the Amur River and east toward the Pacific to the Russian Empire. Chinese remember these agreements as part of their “century of humiliation.” The most important unequal treaties were the Treaty of Argun that gave Imperial Russia six hundred thousand square kilometers of land north of the Amur river and the Treaty of Beijing that provided Imperial Russia with an additional four hundred thousand square kilometers of land east of the Ussuri River, thus granting Russia access to the Pacific coast. Finally, the Treaty of Tabagatai affected Central Asia and gained territory for Russia around today’s Kazakhstan-China border. In conclusion, then Imperial Russia was one of the greatest beneficiaries of China’s 19th century weakness. Unlike Great Britain, which extracted commercial privileges, Russia transformed the crisis into permanent territorial expansion – territories that remain integral parts of Russia today. In the past, Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders criticized the treaties as unjust. Yet, the post-Mao leaders have largely chosen strategic cooperation over reopening the border issues. Yet, history – especially in Chinese culture – has a long memory. Moreover, the sizable discrepancy between the two states’ populations keeps this issue politically sensitive and might resurface again considering Beijing’s global ambitions.
More alarmingly for President Putin and the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China’s expansionist drives in the Pacific and beyond have been motivated by a combination of territorial claims, military positioning, economic influence, diplomatic competition, and strategic access efforts. From the South China Sea claims and militarizations, the pressure on Taiwan, the East China Sea disputes with Japan, the Pacific Island influence campaign, the naval base and logistics expansion, the expansion of the “Blue Economy,” the Belt and Road Initiative,” the Arctic-Pacific connection, also called the “Polar Silk Road,” to a global expansionist geopolitics in Africa as well as Central and South America, Beijing is determined to become a new superpower of the 21st century.
In this global Chinese context, President Putin has been seeking to restore Russian greatness by confronting the West. Instead, he may have accelerated a historic shift: Russia’s movement from being an independent pole of world power toward becoming the weaker partner in a China-centered Eurasian order. Therefore, the greatest threat to the Russian Federation may not come from NATO, as Kremlin propaganda claims, but from the gradual reality of dependence. Empires rarely lose influence only through invasion; sometimes they lose it by becoming indispensable to someone stronger.
The question that future Russian historians may ask is not whether President Putin rebuilt Russian power, but whether, in trying to escape Western influence, he delivered Russia into the outstretched arms of the People’s Republic of China.