Putin and Xi Meet AHEAD of Schedule
For their second meeting since May, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping will get together on Wednesday to show support for one another against the United States and its friends in the West.
Together with other international leaders, the two will gather in Kazakhstan for the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which was established in part to oppose Western dominance.
Leaders from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Iran’s interim president, Mohammad Mokhbar, will be present at the SCO summit in addition to Putin, Xi, and the host, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan.
Of the nine members, only India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is sending his foreign minister instead of the country’s head of state to the conference.
President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, who is the leading supporter of Vladimir Putin, will also be there when the country becomes the tenth member.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, is expected to visit Kazakhstan as well since his country and the group are partners.
Erdogan is the only global leader scheduled to attend both of the premier sessions of the NATO summit in Washington, D.C., which is less than a week away. The two-day meeting takes place before the summit.
The Turkish leader contributed to communication with Russia during the European conflict and offered to act as a mediator between Moscow and Kyiv. He has occasionally caused obstacles for the NATO alliance, especially when Sweden and Finland sought to join the military alliance after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Erdogan is supposedly planning to try to have further talks with Putin at the SCO meeting. Putin has been known to regularly cancel trips to Turkey. India is trying to strike a balance between its relations with Russia and the West in a similar geopolitical maze.
It is said that Modi would not be attending the SCO meeting this year because of a legislative session. However, his presence at the G-7 conference last month—an international organization of which India is not a member—has raised rumors that Modi’s desire to tread carefully on geopolitical issues was the reason he chose not to go.
Countries such as Kazakhstan will use the SCO meeting to strengthen their political and economic relations with neighboring countries. Putin is anticipated to take advantage of the gathering as another chance to demonstrate that, in spite of Western sanctions and worldwide criticism over the conflict in Ukraine, Russia is not cut off from the outside world.
António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, will also be there to maintain contact with all of the important international actors.
