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Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have vowed to deepen their partnership amid ongoing global instability.

Getting into it: The two met Monday on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, their first meeting since May and second face-to-face of the year. In a readout following the meeting, Chinese state news agency Xinhua quoted Xi as saying “uncertainties and unpredictable factors in the international situation have increased markedly,” while insisting that with the two leaders steering things, the relationship between Beijing and Moscow is only going to get sturdier and its outlook better. He said China wants to work with Russia and others to “strengthen the forces leading the reform of global governance and advancing an equal and orderly multipolar world.”

Putin agreed that “cooperation is successfully developing on all fronts,” saying the two countries deal with each other as sovereigns and equals and both come away with something, which he framed as how states ought to operate. He pushed to make visa-free travel between them permanent. “We are ready to work together to make the visa-free regime permanent if the Chinese side considers this possible and useful,” he said, noting that travel between the two countries jumped 43 percent in the first six months of the year. Russia opened visa-free entry for Chinese citizens in December 2025 after China did the same for Russians, and both extended it through the end of 2027.

Putin also talked up the economic side as well, saying farm trade alone is up 34 percent from last year, with energy and transportation also growing. The Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline was on the agenda too, a project on which China has been insisting the gas price match Russia’s domestic rate.

What did not come up much was the ongoing war with Ukraine or Iran. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Ukraine was “discussed in passing, tangentially; there was no actual discussion as such,” and that the meeting was constructive and friendly, with both men trusting each other enough to work through the hardest issues.

Putin also met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, arriving in the same car. Modi said India is ready to work toward ending the Ukraine war, and Putin said Moscow is “following the path” toward a resolution without saying what that means. US-brokered talks remain stalled, though CIA Director John Ratcliffe was in Moscow last week, with American media speculating he carried a warning against supplying weapons to Iran.

This all comes as the summit ran from August 30 to September 1 and marked the bloc’s 25th anniversary, drawing more than a dozen heads of state, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Members of the group say they collectively represent 40% of the world’s population and 25% of global GDP.