Is China Financing Russian Aggression?

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping leave after shaking hands before the opening ceremony of the fourth Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia summit in Shanghai May 21, 2014. REUTERS/Mark Ralston/Pool

China Is Financing Putin’s Aggression -- Gordon Chang, Daily Beast

Russia’s economy is tanking, but Putin is sending long-range bombers on sorties in the Gulf of Mexico and combat troops into Ukraine—thanks to billions in new energy deals from Beijing.

President Obama may say China can be America’s “partner,” as he did Monday in Beijing, but the Chinese calculate their interests differently. The real partnership is between the Dragon and the Bear.

On Sunday in Beijing, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom signed a contract to sell gas from western Siberia to China’s own state energy giant, China National Petroleum Corp.

The Gazprom-CNPC deal is not the only major recent Russia-China energy deal. Last October, state-owned Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer, gave CNPC an equity stake in an oil field in eastern Siberia. This May, Gazprom and CNPC inked a 30-year, $400 billion gas pact, another landmark arrangement in what AFP has described as a rapidly expanding “energy alliance.”

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My Comment: Russia's sale of a percentage of it's oil industry to China was (to me) a surprise. The Russian government has extensive cash reserves, but for reasons of his own Putin wanted this cash to spend elsewhere, and China was more than willing to accommodate him. In this context .... this Chinese - Russian relationship is truly becoming a match in heaven .... China-Russia is a match made in heaven, and that’s scary (Anatole Kaletsky, Reuters).