Vladimir Putin travels to Beijing today for a visit designed to breathe new life into the countries’ faltering relations and showcase the Russian prime minister’s commitment to an eastward tilt in Russian foreign policy.
The Beijing visit, Mr Putin’s first overseas trip since he announced that he will run for the presidency in 2012, follows his comments last week that Russia would seek to create a “Eurasian Union” with former Soviet states, starting with Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Mr Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the Beijing visit had been long planned and has nothing to do with the announcement in September that Mr Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, whose foreign visits focused on the west, would switch jobs next year. The two countries, which share a 4,300km border and fought a brief war in 1969, have been driven into closer co-operation by mutual opposition to what they call a US-led “unipolar” world order, exhibited in their veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution on Syria last week.