The great illusion of Russia’s “pivot to China”

There will be no “reverse Nixon," but Moscow also won't bet the house on Beijing

You hear it so often now, delivered by China’s fan club and Western ‘friends of Russia’: Moscow should stick with Beijing and forget the West. The argument is neat and grounded in plausible numbers, but if only it were that simple.

Let’s start with the arithmetic, because it’s hard to dispute. In the early 2010s, trade between Russia and the United States hovered around $38–43 billion a year, peaking at roughly $43 billion in 2011. Even then, it was modest and a sideshow for both economies.

Now look east. In just the first two months of 2026, Russia–China trade reached a hefty $39 billion, up 12% on the same period last year. Annualised, that’s apparently heading to a yearly total in the region of more than $250 billion, due to the seasonality of these things. Russia, crucially, runs a surplus as it sells more to China than it buys. In practice, this means energy flows east while money flows back. Thus, on raw scale, the comparison with the United States is almost unfair.

And if you widen the lens to the rest of Europe, the contrast becomes even more instructive. In 2019, EU–Russia trade in goods stood at €232.7 billion, with Moscow enjoying a €57 billion surplus. The relationship was built over decades of pipelines and interdependence, all kickstarted by erstwhile German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s late 1960s ‘Ostpolitik.’ It paid wages and heated homes and also helped fund Moscow’s budget, especially during the boom years of the mid-2000s.

So yes, China’s fan club are right about the basic structure. The two countries fit together in a way that Russia and the United States simply don’t. China needs vast volumes of energy and raw materials and Russia produces them. Geography also serves to reinforce the logic because the last thing Moscow wants is a hostile power sitting across its long eastern frontier. That alone would actually justify the partnership in a country so security obsessed as Russia.

But numbers can also mislead. Because while trade volumes tell you what’s happening, they don’t tell you how it feels to those inside the relationship.

And here the picture is far more nuanced than the headline figures suggest. When you talk to Russian officials or businesspeople, you often hear a familiar refrain. They complain that Beijing drives a hard bargain, with gas negotiations a case in point. China is accused of pushing relentlessly for discounts and looking to pay prices similar to those available on the domestic Russian market. That’s something the EU never asked for, they lament, noting how the Germans always paid a premium without protests. Furthermore, in the consumer sector, there’s a lingering irritation that Chinese carmakers prefer to ship their vehicles into Russia rather than build them locally, the way Volkswagen and Hyundai once did.

None of this amounts to calls for a reversal of policy, but it does introduce a note of caution into what outsiders sometimes try to present as a supposedly seamless alignment.

The fact also remains that Russia is a European country by both culture and habit. There’s a reason why almost ten times more people live in Saint Petersburg than in Vladivostok and you can’t change that with a few years of sanctions and a spike in eastward trade. Because, whether we like it or not, habits formed over centuries tend to outlast the fashions of any given decade and it’s not so long ago that you could get in your car and drive from Smolensk to Warsaw or Riga.

Inside Moscow, there’s no unanimous settled view. There are, instead, competing instincts. One camp looks westward and argues that, once the current confrontation subsides, some form of working relationship with Western Europe, and indeed the United States, must be rebuilt. Another resolutely sees the future in Eurasia, with China as the central partner in a new alignment. A third, and perhaps the most traditionally Russian, would prefer to sit on both stools.

What’s broadly agreed is that Russia won’t join a US-led coalition against China. The partnership with Beijing is too valuable and too essential. So you can rule out a ‘reverse Nixon.’ And if the US government truly believes it’s possible, well, they need new analysts and a major wake up call.

But it’s equally wrong to imagine Moscow simply accepting a future of permanent dependence on China, for reasons as much psychological as anything else. Great powers don’t like leaning too heavily on any one partner, however friendly the current moment may seem.

Thus, the most plausible outcome is something more characteristically Russian such as a form of deliberate flexibility. This will mean strong ties with Beijing, yes, but also the option to reopen practical relations with Western Europe and the United States when circumstances allow.

Close to many, owned by none, as it were.