Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday said Vladimir Putin’s most recent nuclear posturing suggested the Kremlin didn’t get all it wanted from Xi Jinping’s state visit last week.

Conspicuously absent from more than a dozen “agreements” signed in Moscow this month was a deal on the so-called “Power of Siberia 2” natural gas pipeline.

Nowhere is the power asymmetry between Xi and Putin more apparent than in the latter’s almost desperate attempts to finalize arrangements for the Nordstream-esque project. The envisioned link has the potential to dramatically increase Russia’s pipeline gas sales to China. And therein lies the (prospective) problem.

Beijing is obsessively intent on diverse sourcing for everything China needs and can’t produce enough of domestically. Diversity of supply minimizes the risk associated with any one counterparty going bust, and when it comes to counterparty risk, Russia is as dicey as it gets. Putin’s energy is tantamount to contraband, Russia is cut off from the dollar-based financial system and in the event the domestic economy ever succumbs to the US-led international pressure campaign, a bailout package from multilateral lenders beholden to Washington would be an extraordinarily tough sell.

Xi isn’t going to turn China into Germany when it comes to Russian energy, particularly given the sheer number of alternatives Beijing has for securing gas. Demand growth for gas in China is expected to slow going forward notwithstanding the country’s environmental agenda, and if you think Xi wasn’t paying attention when German industry was pushed to the brink of oblivion last summer by the specter of an acute gas shortage, I’ve got a pipeline through Mongolia to sell you.

As one observer put it, speaking to The New York Times about the outcome of Xi’s state visit last week, “There is some substantive agenda but it’s nothing where you can pin Xi down and say, ‘Oh, but with this agreement you are providing money to Putin’s war chest.'” That’s by design, of course. Xi isn’t going to be “pinned down.” Not by Putin, and not by anybody else either.

Xi said his Moscow visit was “rich in results,” but I’m not sure Moscow came away any richer. It was also notable that last year’s pre-war, “no-limits” strategic partnership with “no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation” is now explicitly not “the kind of military-political alliance during the Cold War.” I can assure you that if things had gone according to Putin’s original plan in Ukraine, Beijing wouldn’t have insisted on any such clarification, to the extent Xi did, in fact, insist on it.

Bottom line: Beijing wants to stick by Russia but doesn’t want to get stuck with Russia in the event things take a turn for the worst. Putin has no allies capable of propping the country up economically other than Xi. Xi knows that, and he surely doesn’t want to pre-commit (even implicitly) to bailing out a failed state. More narrowly, doubling China’s natural gas imports from Russia risks a scenario where Putin does something bad enough in Ukraine to trigger more sanctions, with potential dollar-access issues for countries importing large amounts of Russian energy.

“What does it mean? It means that [Xi’s] visit was not good for Russia,” Zelensky told the AP, the first news organization to accompany him on his train travels around the war-torn country. He was referring to Putin’s suggestion that Russia would place nuclear weapons in Belarus.

Zelensky was very keen to emphasize that the battle for Bakhmut is mission-critical for both sides. It’s not strategically valuable, but a victory for Russia there (it’s actually the Wagner Group fighting) would be “sold to the West, to Russia, to China and to Iran” by Putin as evidence that Ukraine can’t hold out forever. “We can’t lose steps,” Zelensky said. “Our society will push me to compromise with them” if Bakhmut falls, he suggested.

Meanwhile, Beijing is irate at the prospect of Tsai Ing-wen meeting a second US House Speaker in the space of eight months. Tsai is due in New York this week and she’ll visit L.A. later after meetings in Central America. Honduras established diplomatic ties with China last week, leaving Taiwan with just 13 sovereign recognitions.

“If she meets with [Kevin] McCarthy, it will be another provocation that severely violates the ‘One China’ principle, damages China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and sabotages peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said Wednesday, while threatening an unspecified “response.” Tsai, before boarding a plane that was escorted across the Pacific by fighter jets, said, “We won’t give in.”

Back on the train in Ukraine, Zelensky described the Russian military to the AP. “It’s a big army with small hearts.”