Putin is more ‘with’ than ‘in’ China’s belt and road plan, analysts say

“[The belt and road] also rhymes with our idea of creating a Greater Eurasian Partnership as an area of cooperation and interaction among like-minded nations and the alignment of various integration processes,” Putin said.

“Putin considers [the belt and road programme] to be complementary to Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership, which refers to his vision of peacefully integrating the supercontinent through the expansion of bilateral trade and non-Western institutions like the SCO,” said Moscow-based international relations expert Andrew Korybko.

He said that by providing regional states with objective interests, Russia wanted them to enter into “relations of complex mutual interdependence” such that there were no cracks big enough for the US to exploit.

“[The belt and road plan] advances this goal at a scale that Russia is incapable of, owing to China’s much greater excess capital that it is investing in infrastructure and other types of connectivity projects,” Korybko said.

According to Anna Kireeva, associate professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, run by the foreign ministry, Russia has sought its own way of working with Beijing on the initiative.

She noted that Moscow had not officially joined the belt and road plan by signing a memorandum of understanding.

“It chose a formula of coordinating the EAEU, a Russian-led integration grouping, with the belt and road … [which] enables [Moscow] to pursue its own integration agenda through the Greater Eurasian Partnership – with ambitions to become a Eurasian powerhouse and integration centre – while leaving the door open for cooperative relations with China,” she said.

Korybko said Moscow was fully aware that Beijing’s vast infrastructure project could curb its own status as a trade giant in the former Soviet space, but Russia valued the stability and development Chinese financing could bring.

“Putin’s embrace of [the belt and road scheme] can therefore be interpreted as Russia’s tacit acceptance of the erosion of its previously dominant influence in the Central Asian republics, so long as this only takes economic forms and contributes to stabilising this geostrategic space through the tangible improvement of its people’s lives,” he said.

Bilateral trade between China and Russia soared by 30 per cent in the first half of the year and is expected to exceed US$200 billion by year-end, according to the Russian government.

Korybko said Moscow did not fear Beijing advancing its political or military interests in the region at its expense. But Russia also does not want China to be the dominant player in its plans for the Northern Sea Route – a 5,600km (3,480 miles) shipping lane that runs between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

That is where India comes in, according to Korybko.

“India already invests in some of Russia’s Arctic energy projects and could be incentivised to scale up these investments to keep pace with China’s predictably forthcoming ones, which would pre-empt the scenario of [Beijing] becoming the dominant player there and thus maintain balance between them,” he said.

Putin gets diplomatic stage at belt and road gathering in Beijing

Russia still has economic clout in the Global South. In Beijing for the summit last month, Putin held talks with several Southeast Asian leaders – new Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong, Laos President Thongloun Sisoulith and Indonesian President Joko Widodo.

Kireeva said Moscow was looking for areas where Russian, EAEU and Chinese interests collide. But it also wants to ensure that the belt and road plan does not “change the rules of the game and undermine Russian efforts in Eurasian integration”.

She said Moscow was open to Beijing’s presence in the region because of an “urgent need” to reorient its exports eastward from Europe and the Far East, where there are logistical bottlenecks, to Asia – primarily China.

“Putin’s speech at the forum this year was different from the previous two in that it emphasises not only existing transport infrastructure, such as the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Baikal-Amur Mainline, but also new prospective routes within the International North-South Transport Corridor,” Kireeva said.

The transnational corridor is a 7,200km ship, rail and road route stretching from Moscow to Mumbai. Its purpose is to expand Russian trade links across Asia and Eurasia and create synergies with the belt and road scheme, according to Kireeva.

Echoing Korybko’s remarks, she said Russia’s Arctic territories “badly need investment”, which could be supplemented by Beijing’s initiative. “Here China is a natural partner for Moscow, given its demand in energy resources, competencies in construction and related technology.”

She pointed to Yamal LNG – Russia’s energy megaproject in the Arctic – as an example of “win-win cooperation” between the neighbouring countries. State-owned China National Petroleum Corporation has a 20 per cent stake in the project.

Zoon Ahmed Khan, a research fellow at Tsinghua University’s Belt and Road Strategy Institute in Beijing, said Putin’s plans aligned with China’s stated vision for the belt and road programme – to plan, build and benefit together with member states.

“Putin’s speech at the [summit] echoed the growing trend that was also highlighted in Xi [Jinping]’s speech – multilateralisation of the Belt and Road Initiative,” said Khan, who is also a fellow at Beijing-based think tank the Centre for China and Globalisation.

“What that essentially means is that existing plans for connectivity do not need to compete, but instead can cooperate with the belt and road.”

Khan said Russia’s connectivity plans for Eurasia were “fundamentally no different” than the existing belt and road projects, adding that Beijing had also encouraged cooperation, rather than competition, with the Group of Seven’s Build Back Better World and the European Union’s Global Gateway.

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Khan said the success of cooperation between the belt and road plan and the Greater Eurasian Partnership would be determined by the “agency, willingness and capacity” of Eurasian and post-Soviet countries.

“The specifics of whether, how and/or to what degree Chinese companies and investment can contribute to these plans is a much more nuanced and pragmatic discussion for both sides, involving partner countries,” she said.

She added that the compatibility of the two neighbours could also be seen in platforms like the SCO and Brics. “These emphasise their common vision of a multipolar world, and the need for multilateral cooperation.”