“We are working in solidarity on the formulation of a more just and democratic multipolar world order,” Vladimir Putin said Thursday in Beijing, where he spent the day commiserating with Moscow’s Chinese benefactors.

Do take a moment to appreciate the sheer, blatant absurdity on display: Here are two dictators, one of whom doesn’t even pretend to preside over a democracy, the other creates choiceless elections by assassinating political opponents, claiming for themselves the right to define the contours of a “more just and democratic” world.

The kitsch show of esprit de corps in the Chinese capital came a little over a week after Putin, freshly “elected” to a fifth presidential term, threw himself an elaborate inauguration party at the Kremlin complete with a blessing from Patriarch Kirill, whose war propagandizing is a grotesque example of Russia’s elite instrumentalizing and exploiting the human tragedy next door.

China was welcoming, of course. Putin was treated to a farcically overwrought fuss in Beijing, where soldiers honored the would-be tsar with a 21-gun salute.

Xi also mustered a marching band for the occasion and, in an especially silly spectacle, enlisted a group of Chinese children who were obliged to leap and wave to Putin like circus animals.

Pomp aside, the “no limits” strategic relationship between Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia isn’t a partnership of equals. Trade between the two countries hit a record last year at roughly a quarter of trillion dollars, most of which, Putin was keen to emphasize, is settled in yuan and rubles, “safeguarding” bilateral trade “from the influence of third countries,” as he put it.

But China doesn’t need rubles. The ruble is scrip backed by contraband. Xi’s does want the contraband (i.e., Russian commodities), particularly when it can be had at a discount, but that’s opportunism. And it should be contrasted with Putin’s desperation.

The yuan isn’t quite a hard currency, but it’s close, and it’s the only (quasi)hard currency Russia can access. Putin cut himself off from major markets for Russian oil and gas (Gazprom recorded its first annual loss in a quarter century in 2023), and he’s almost entirely reliant on China for the so-called “dual use” technology that’s helping to sustain the Kremlin’s war machine.

It’s an open secret that Moscow’s received material support from Chinese firms over the course of the war, and the US is running out of patience with those transfers. Last month, US government sources assessed that in Q4, Russia got nearly three quarters of its machine tools and almost all of its microelectronics from China. (That marks something of a one-eighty. During the Soviet era, it was China which depended on the USSR for machine tools.)

To be sure, Xi’s glad to count a nuclear power and fellow Security Council P5′er as a partner in his quest to counteract US hegemony, but we should be clear: Russia isn’t in a position to be a pole in a multipolar world. Putin has his nukes and his gas — not nothin’ — but he’s put his country on the North Korea path. Xi already has one North Korea to protect and babysit: The North Korea. He surely doesn’t want another one.

As Stephen Kotkin wrote for Foreign Affairs last month, Russia and North Korea “could scarcely be more different” on any number of dimensions, but Russia could nevertheless “become something of a gigantic North Korea: Domestically repressive, internationally isolated and transgressive, armed with nuclear weapons and abjectly dependent on China but still able to buck Beijing.”

Putin’s decision to install the son of a Soviet economist at the helm of the defense ministry appears to suggest the Kremlin believes the Russian economy will be on a war footing in perpetuity. That, in turn, suggests Putin’s resigned to Russia being a pariah state in perpetuity. (Andrey Belousov, the new defense minister, accompanied Putin to China on Thursday.)

Again, I don’t think Xi necessarily wants another pet pariah, particularly one that could (and probably would) exercise more in the way of latitude when it comes to engaging in mischief than the Kim regime. It’s highly unlikely that Pyongyang will pull Beijing into a world war. But Moscow might, accidentally or not.

For now, Xi’s more than happy to put the Sino-Russo nexus on display as “a model for a new type of international relations,” as he put it Thursday, adding that China and Russia should “always firmly support each other on issues involving each other’s core interests and major concerns.”

Putin will doubtlessly be pleased with the optics around his visit to China. But watching the videos and scrolling through pictures from the pageantry, the asymmetry of the relationship at times appears obvious.

In one image, a glowering Xi — hardly a tall man — towers over a visibly giddy Putin as the two walk together down a hall. In another, Putin leans in across the table at a meeting of the two countries’ delegations, while Xi sits straight, donning a patronizing smile.

In remarks carried by CCTV, Xi said China remains “ready to work with Russia as a good neighbor,” and intends to “consolidate the friendship between the two peoples for generations to come.”