Xi Jinping has criticised the “bullying behaviour” of other countries while Vladimir Putin has blamed the west for his war on Ukraine, on the second day of a major summit in China which seeks to challenge western-led multilateral blocs.
The Shanghai Cooperation Summit (SCO) began in the city of Tianjin on Sunday, with Xi welcoming dozens of leaders from Eurasian member states and other partner and observer countries, including Putin, and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.
In a speech to delegates on Monday, Putin claimed the war was not triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but was “a result of a coup in Ukraine, which was supported and provoked by the west”.
“The second reason for the crisis is the west’s constant attempts to drag Ukraine into Nato,” the Russian president added.
Russia’s three-and-a-half year war has killed tens of thousands of people and devastated much of eastern Ukraine.
Putin’s remarks followed a speech by Xi, who said “the security and development tasks facing member states have become even more challenging”, and urged them to “oppose cold war mentality, bloc confrontation, and bullying”.
“We must uphold the international system with the United Nations at its core and support the multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization at its core.”
Xi praised the growth of the SCO, saying they were building a new model of “true multilateralism”.
He urged further cooperation of member countries in leveraging their “mega-scale markets” to boost trade and investment, and said China would provide 2bn yuan ($280m) of free aid to member states this year and a further 10bn yuan of loans to a SCO banking consortium.
The Tianjin summit is the biggest SCO meeting since it was formed in 2002, and is a key part of Beijing’s push to challenge the dominance of US or western-led groups such as Nato. That effort has been boosted by the global upheaval caused by US president Donald Trump’s tariffs and other foreign policy changes.
Among the attendees is India’s leader Modi, on his first visit to China in seven years. The two nations had long traded hostilities over a Himalayan border dispute, trade, and China’s support for India’s rival Pakistan.
But the meeting on Sunday, five days after Washington imposed punishing 50% tariffs on Indian goods due to Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil, showed the relationship was thawing.
Xi said China-India ties could be “stable and far-reaching” if both sides focused on viewing each other as partners instead of rivals, state media reported.
Xi, Putin and Modi were seen chatting on live footage, the three leaders flanked by their official translators. In his remarks on Monday, Putin also praised the efforts of China and India “aimed at facilitating the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis”.
Many of the assembled dignitaries will be in Beijing on Wednesday to witness a military parade marking 80 years since the end of the second world war. The event will also be attended by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
On Monday, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said that the summit had issued a statement calling for the international community to uphold the “correct” perspective on world war two and said that SCO members had fought side by side in that conflict.
In recent months China has highlighted its role, alongside the Soviet Union’s, in defeating Japan and Germany in the second world war.
Analysts will be closely watching for any formal meeting between Putin, Xi and Kim. North Korea’s assistance to Russia’s war is believed to have rankled Xi, who is trying to balance its Russian alliance with avoiding any further punitive responses from the US over the war in Ukraine.
“It is publicly known that North Korean soldiers are already present on the Ukrainian battlefield, and Russia and North Korea have close military cooperation. If all three were to meet, it would be very striking to the United States, highlighting a potential new cold war dynamic,” said Lim Chuan-Tiong, a researcher with the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo.
“If such a meeting does not take place, it is likely because China does not want to overly provoke the US while maintaining a certain degree of triangular ambiguity.”
Additional research by Lillian Yang
