Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomed Russia’s Vladimir Putin as an “old friend” as the two leaders held bilateral talks in Beijing amid shared tensions with the United States. Putin hailed Moscow’s relationship with Beijing as at an “unprecedentedly high level.” Both leaders inked a long-stalled agreement to build a massive new pipeline to send natural gas to China via Mongolia. The pipeline, which will supply 50 billion cubic meters of gas annually from western Russia to northern China, is a project Moscow has long sought to push off the drawing board. It could offset nearly half of the gas exports to Europe that Russia has lost since the Ukraine war began. n18oc_world n18oc_crux