China's top diplomat visits Moscow for security talks as Beijing-Russia alliance deepens

Wang Yi stepped off the plane in Moscow on Monday carrying the weight of two nuclear powers trying to figure out what they are to each other. China's foreign minister had come for four days of talks with Russian officials—his second trip to the capital since February—at a moment when Beijing and Moscow were both watching the same horizon and wondering if they could trust what they saw there.

The timing was deliberate and loaded. Just days earlier, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had visited Putin in the Russian capital, touring military facilities and meeting privately with the president in what Western observers read as the opening moves of a potential military alliance. Wang's arrival so soon after suggested China wanted to understand what was happening, to make sure it remained central to Russia's calculations, to signal that Beijing's partnership with Moscow was the relationship that mattered most.

Wang traveled with Liu Hui, the head of the Communist Party's foreign affairs office, and was scheduled to remain through Thursday. The centerpiece of his visit would be a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to discuss Ukraine, security in the Far East, and the architecture of their broader alliance. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the talks would cover "a broad range of aspects of bilateral cooperation, including high- and summit-level contacts." She emphasized that the two countries would highlight their joint work across multiple international forums—the United Nations, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the G20, and APEC. It was the language of powers trying to build something that looked like a counterweight to Western influence.

Whether Wang would meet with Putin himself remained unclear. But the visit carried a specific purpose beyond routine diplomacy. Russia's Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev had urged the trip, and Moscow had a concrete ask: convince Putin to travel to Beijing next month for the Belt and Road summit. For Putin, such a journey would be his first visit to China since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022—a symbolic return to the world stage after the International Criminal Court had issued a warrant for his arrest on allegations of war crimes.

The optics of Wang's visit were complicated by what had just happened in Malta. Hours before boarding his flight to Moscow, Wang had wrapped up what Chinese officials called "open, substantive and constructive strategic negotiations" with U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. The two had discussed Ukraine and the persistent tensions over Taiwan. Wang was, in effect, shuttling between the two superpowers—talking to Washington about restraint, then flying to Moscow to talk about deepening ties. Chinese officials characterized such diplomatic rotation as routine; senior diplomats from Beijing and Moscow had met nearly every year since the early 2000s, they noted, as part of the ordinary work of strengthening bilateral security.

Yet nothing about the moment felt ordinary. The Ukraine war had scrambled the old equations. China was suspected of providing technology to Russia to support its military operations, though Beijing had stopped short of sending weapons. The two countries had "maintained close communication on major strategic and global issues of common interest," according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. But communication and alignment were not the same thing. Wang's visit was an attempt to make sure they stayed aligned—to deepen the alliance at a moment when both countries faced pressure from the West and both were watching to see if North Korea might become a third pillar of something larger.