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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Russia’s role is now to feed China. The Xi–Putin bond is like a loveless marriage

Like Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan, Russia’s role is simply to feed the dragon. Low energy prices help Beijing, not Moscow.

For two days, the carcasses of the hunters lay stretched out on the ice sheets of Karatash mountain alongside their prey, the sacred Argali ram. Alexander Kosopkin, the presidential envoy to the State Duma, the senior Parliament official Sergey Livishin, the beer tycoon Boris Ivanovich Belinsky, the folk musician Vasily Vyalkov, Anatoly Bannykh, the deputy prime minister,  Viktor Kaimin, the official guardian of wildlife.

The friends had commandeered a helicopter operated by Gazpromavia, a subsidiary of the state-owned energy giant Gazprom, to corral and hunt down the critically endangered Argali with automatic weapons, ignoring laws banning shooting wildlife from the air. 

The men had much to celebrate in that new year, 2009. Though few knew it, plans had been put in place to drive a massive gas pipeline through Altai, bringing enormous wealth to one of Russia’s most backward regions. The hunting ended in tragedy, though. As the helicopter manoeuvred to retrieve the slain ram from the mountain, battling minus 26 degrees Celsius temperatures and sharp winds, the pilots lost control of the Mi-171.

Four years later, the original pipeline project was shelved as Gazprom shifted to a new eastward alignment. Then, the world changed: The Altai pipeline, also known as the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, is back.

Last week, when Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping met in Beijing, the leaders agreed on a plan that will bind their nations with ties of steel. The plan was abandoned amid disagreements over pricing, and Moscow’s worries that it would end up dependent on a single buyer. The Siberia pipeline was instead stretched east towards Vladivostok, to serve markets in Japan and South Korea, with a fork turning southward into China.  

Few details have been released, but experts believe the loss of Gazprom’s markets in Europe—brought about by the reported Ukrainian sabotage of the undersea Nord Stream pipeline in........

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