Putin, Xi meet for high-stakes talks in challenge to West

Samarkand, Uzbekistan (AFP):

Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have gathered with other Asian leaders in the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand for a regional summit aimed at challenging Western global influence.

Xi and Putin will be joined by the leaders of India, Pakistan, Turkiye, Iran and several other countries for the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

While the main summit day will be Friday, there is a vitally important meeting between the Russian and Chinese leaders on Thursday that will be the most closely watched.

For Putin, the summit is a chance to show that Russia cannot be isolated internationally, at a time when Moscow’s forces are facing major battlefield setbacks in Ukraine.

For Xi — on his first trip abroad since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic — it is an opportunity to shore up his credentials as a global statesman.

“The SCO offers a real alternative to Western-centric organisations,” Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporters in Moscow this week.

“All members of the SCO stand for a just world order,” he said, describing the summit as taking place “against the background of large-scale geopolitical changes”.