As a noticeably puffy-faced Vladimir welcomed his ‘dear friend’ to the Kremlin yesterday, the Russian despot acted as if he was hosting his equal.After all, he no doubt reasoned, needs Russian oil and gas for its energy-devouring economy. The Kremlin is also a handy ally for in opposing what the two dictators see as America’s domination of global affairs. When the two met in China last year, they issued a statement declaring that the ‘friendship’ between their regimes ‘has no limits’.Xi seemed happy to play along with this fiction yesterday. He knows that the presence of a bona fide world leader travelling to Moscow is of huge domestic propaganda value to Putin, enabling him to show his subjects that his gruesome war has not left him entirely isolated on the international stage.
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