In international diplomacy, summit meetings stand apart from regular high-level meetings when they are held at key moments or important junctures to reinforce partnerships and/or launch major initiatives.

The summit meeting at Beijing last Thursday between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin last falls into such a category, taking place at a momentous juncture when a great shift in the global power dynamic is happening and the breathtaking spectacle of history in the making playing out in real time. (Read my article in NewsClick titled Sino-Russian Entente Shifts Tectonic Plates of World Politics.)

The two statesmen spent an entire Thursday together after Putin’s presidential jet landed at the crack of dawn in Beijing. Extensive and very detailed discussions indeed took place. As Putin said later, this was a state visit which turned into a “working visit.”

The “debriefing” on Saturday by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for the foreign and security policy elite in Moscow at the annual plenary of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy — Russia’s equivalent of the Council of Foreign Relations headquartered in New York — soon after Putin’s entourage returned from China gives some invaluable glimpses into the ‘inside track’ of the closed-door discussions in Beijing.

At the most obvious level, Lavrov hit hard in his speech at the US and its NATO Allies with exceptional bluntness that their agenda to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia militarily and otherwise — to “decolonise’’ or “dismember” Russia, et al — is pure fantasy and it will be resolutely countered. Lavrov predicted that the escalation in western weapon supplies to Ukraine only highlights the ground reality that “the acute phase of the military-political confrontation with the West” will continue in “full swing”.

The western thought processes are veering round dangerously to “the contours of the formation of........

© Eurasia Review