News Snapshot:
The Putin-Xi summit in Moscow ended without any grand pronouncements or overwhelming actions. Yet it produced a joint statement that deserves careful reflection. The statement makes sense only in the context of substantive Russian strategy in Ukraine: Russia is in this for the long haul, as is China. Major public statements from dictatorships often are perceived as lacking substance, given their reliance on boilerplate language and the difficulty of harmonizing an authoritarian regime’s political-linguistic tropes. Hence, observers miss the crucial fact that, in regimes such as Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the specific phrasing and structure of major...