{"text":[[{"start":6.5,"text":"The writer is director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin"}],[{"start":11.3,"text":"During much of the 19th century, the offspring of Russia’s rich and powerful spoke French before they ever learnt their native tongue — thanks to their French nannies. Subtly mocked by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, this phenomenon attests to the captivation of Russia’s imperial elite by French culture. Fast forward to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and there is a similar pattern — albeit with a different foreign source of admiration. "}],[{"start":37.7,"text":"“My daughter started to speak Mandarin before she spoke Russian. Her nanny was from a village near Beijing,” Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary of many years, confessed during his boss’s trip to Beijing this week. “She loves Chinese and China.”"}],[{"start":53.45,"text":"The occasion of Putin’s visit to Beijing, coming hot on the heels of US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping, was the 25th anniversary of the Treaty of Friendship between the two countries. Signed in 2001, this document paved the way for settling the border dispute between them and remains Putin’s most positive foreign policy achievement to this day."}],[{"start":74.55000000000001,"text":"What ensued in the next quarter of a century is a different story. China spent these years patiently building leverage — and has emerged as America’s only peer competitor as a result. Putin’s Russia, intoxicated by the oil price boom of the 2000s, squandered its unique window of opportunity to modernise. It has ended up with an authoritarian regime presided over by an out-of-touch leader, an ugly unwinnable war against Ukraine, and isolation from the west. This self-diminishing course has forced Russia to lock itself into a relationship with Beijing that is increasingly one-sided."}],[{"start":110.9,"text":"The outcomes of Putin’s visit are clear testament to this. Take energy, the backbone of economic ties between China and Russia. Moscow had hoped the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz would incentivise Beijing to greenlight the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, intended to bring 50bn cubic metres a year of gas to China from the fields in Siberia that previously supplied Europe. Given how cash-strapped the Kremlin is because of its ballooning war bill, revenues from this new project (and a possible Chinese credit line) would come in handy. However, Xi rebuffed his “best friend”: the price offered by Putin was not sweet enough. The truth is that China can afford to cherry-pick from the menu of co-operation projects that Russia is pitching."}],[{"start":158.15,"text":"The lack of progress on Power of Siberia 2 will not change the overall trajectory of Russia’s growing dependence on trade with China. In the first four months of this year alone, trade grew 20 per cent to $85bn and is likely to surpass the 2024 record of $245bn. Behind these figures are increased exports of discounted Russian oil and growing imports from China, mostly in dual-use goods that feed the Russian war machine."}],[{"start":185.8,"text":"The tense situation in global energy markets has given Russia some breathing space, but the main trend stays the same: China’s share in Russian trade is rapidly growing at the expense of other partners, while Beijing remains diversified and less dependent on Moscow."}],[{"start":202.70000000000002,"text":"As the asymmetry grows, so will Beijing’s temptation to wield that leverage beyond demanding hefty discounts on hydrocarbons — for example, expanding the Chinese presence in the Russian Arctic, or Beijing vetoing Russian arms sales to countries like India or Vietnam. If Russia stays on its current course, a decade from now it will face a choice: become subservient to China and not be able to do much about it, like some smaller countries in south-east Asia, or be dependent on China while trying to maintain strategic autonomy through autarky, as North Korea has done."}],[{"start":239.05,"text":"What could fuel Russian subservience to China even further is Beijing’s careful efforts to expand educational, scientific and cultural ties to Russia — with dozens of new co-operation agreements in this area signed during the Putin-Xi summit. China is exploiting the vacuum created by the breakdown of ties between Moscow and Europe to lock Russia into its own cultural and educational sphere. "}],[{"start":262.7,"text":"With a newly extended visa-free travel scheme, dozens of daily flights connecting major cities, and lavish university scholarships and research grants, China aims to become the symbol of progress for generations of younger Russians like Peskov’s daughter — and to replace Europe in its traditional role. In combination with the EU’s deliberate efforts to sever people-to-people ties to Russia, and a new generation of Russian elites groomed in a spirit of hostility towards the west, Beijing’s unlikely bet may pay off."}],[{"start":301.4,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1779453809_6457.mp3"}