Xi, Putin Meet Ahead of Winter Olympics Opening

By Staff, Agencies

China’s President Xi Jinping is poised for his first face-to-face meeting with a world leader in nearly two years on Friday when he hosts Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

The pair is drawing closer as tensions grow with the West over Ukraine and other issues.

Xi has not left China since January 2020, when the country was grappling with its initial COVID-19 outbreak and locked down the central city of Wuhan where the virus was first detected.

He is now readying to meet more than 20 world leaders as Beijing kicks off a Winter Olympics it hopes will be a soft-power triumph and shift focus away from a build-up blighted by a diplomatic boycott and coronavirus fears.

Xi and Putin will meet in the Chinese capital before their nations release a joint statement reflecting their “common views” on security and other issues, a top Kremlin adviser said at a press briefing on Wednesday.

They will then attend the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday evening.

Spiraling tensions with the West have bolstered ties between the world’s largest and most populous nations, and Putin was the first foreign leader to confirm his presence at the opening ceremony.

He hailed Russia’s “model” relations with Beijing in a December phone call with Xi, calling his Chinese counterpart a “dear friend.”

China’s state-run Xinhua news agency carried an article from Putin on Thursday in which he painted a portrait of two neighbors with increasingly shared global goals.

“Foreign policy coordination between Russia and China is based on close and coinciding approaches to solving global and regional issues,” Putin wrote.

He also hit out at the US-led Western diplomatic boycotts of the Beijing Olympics that were sparked by China’s human rights record.