As Chinese President Xi Jinping alit in Moscow, behind the white gloves and golden epaulettes of the honor guard, the 21-gun salute, and the toasts in the Kremlin loomed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desperate quest for China’s materiel and weapons. Will he succeed?

A Russian expression “history with geography” (istoriya s geografiey) describes something complex and long to untangle. A few years back I used this collocation literally to argue that there was far too much bad history and contentious geography to declare a Sino-Russian “alliance” a done deal. Is it time to revise this take?

In a sign of greater closeness between the two nations, bilateral trade is up sharply. Yet the increase is largely due to China scooping, at a steep discount, Russian oil that used to flow to the West while taking Europe’s place as Russia’s largest source of imports. There will be trade agreements signed with great fanfare but they will feature more of the same: more oil and gas from Russia and more goods from China.

Xi’s rhetoric has definitely hardened in the past four years and approached Putin’s increasingly hysterical orations of victimization and defiance.  “What with the all-around containment,” “encirclement,” and “suppression of China,” perpetrated by the US, the Chinese president at times appears to have borrowed a Kremlin speechwriter. Yet, as with Putin, Xi’s rhetorical cannons are deployed mostly in pursuit of domestic political objectives.     

Much like Putin who faced a dire economic forecast in the beginning of his third presidential term, Xi is confronted with a sharply declining GDP in his own third term and is shifting the basis of his regime’s legitimacy from economic progress and income growth to militarized patriotism. As his Kremlin host, Xi is transitioning from the manager and distributor of national wealth to a wartime president: the motherland’s defender, the vanquisher of its perennially plotting enemies, and executor of his nation preordained destiny of grandeur.

Again as with Putin, the tiger of militarized patriotism may prove impossible to dismount and the Beijing regime may need war to maintain legitimacy, with Taiwan instead of Ukraine the target of aggression. Yet, by all indicators, Xi is not there yet in his domestic political schedule. He has set China on a course that closely parallels Putin’s but the intersection of the two paths—and direct support for Putin’s war—is not likely to be in the cards yet.      

Of the eight Ukraine-related votes in the UN Security Council and General Assembly since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, China voted “no” with Russia only twice (on war reparations and human rights violations in Crimea) but abstained on the more critical votes condemning Russia’s invasion and its consequences. The joint military exercises have become more frequent but, as before, China’s commitment of men, ships, and aircraft is hardly large scale and always inferior to that of Russia.

Finally, as five years ago, a key obstacle to a true political-military alliance is still there: despite the cooling of the trade with the West, China’s embeddedness in the world economy is orders of magnitude greater in extent and depth than that of Russia’s. It has far more to lose than Russia if it joins Putin in its anti-Western crusade—at least for now.

Putin should not hold his breath.

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