Neither one of them is looking for friends
Only cooperation in common interests
Russia is much closer to our values , western values, than is China
China is the long term challenge to both of us
Except Russia and China are glued together by geography if nothing else
I agree Russia vs. China is a very real thing but I take issue with your “Western” values trope.
1) Most people who support Putin on these forums have never lived in Russia. You can love Russia, be anti-Soros, and still be against Putin. As I am.
2) Where do you think China got their communist cues from? Mongolia? No. Russia. The Revolution in Russia.
3) Karl Marx and Friederich Engels were what? WESTERNERS. Communism is a Western idea.
4) The Soviet Union installed the Kim Il Sung regime in North Korea, a country Putin and China prop up to this day.
3) China’s economy is several times bigger, stronger, and faster growing than Putin’s Russia. Is Russia’s “Western” values holding it back? Perhaps: after all, Putin’s crony oligarchs have spent the past 20 years plundering the Russian people and their land only to then store their spoils where? In *Globalist* *Western* Banks. Why in those banks and not in Russia? Must be their Western values.
4) Putin once said: Russian “Orthodoxy has more in common with Islam than Roman Catholicism” — namely Western Christianity. You can look up the tape.
5) Just last week in an interview about Valaam monastery, Putin said “Communism is like Christianity and Lenin’s body like saintly relics.”
Indeed you should visit Lenin’s tomb in Moscow id you have not already. To the satisfaction of many, Putin has promised not to bury him.
Finally: one Orthodox bishop (in Siberia) publicly condemned Putin’s statement.