With President Putin at Beijing today during his first trip outside the former Soviet Union in more than a year, cracks are appearing in the Kremlin’s “no limits” partnership with China­. At Beijing, China’s president, Xi Jinping, hailed his “deep friendship” with Mr. Putin and said Russia-China trade will hit a record $200 billion this year. Yet back home, two influential Kremlin ideologues warn: The panda’s embrace is getting too tight.

Russian police are checking to see if Mr. Putin’s former chief strategist broke the law by authoring an article suggesting that Russia, Europe, and America are natural allies.

“There will be a Great North — Russia, the USA and Europe, forming a common socio-cultural space,” Vladislav Surkov, a key architect of Putin’s “vertical power” system, writes in an article titled, “Birth of the North.”  

Mr. Surkov adds that “a common future is predetermined by common roots. The three largest northern civilizations, Russian, European and American, draw inspiration in their political development from Pax Romana.” Pointedly, China is not mentioned in the article or listed as a future member of the “Great North.” Instead, in a reference to the “global South,” he writes: “There is no south without a north.”

More heresy came from a prominent Kremlin propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, who warned recently on Russia-1 state TV that relying on China could be “very dangerous.” Speaking on his weekly “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.” show, Mr. Solovyov said: “It’s dangerous to replace America with China. … And just as we used to put all our eggs in the Anglo-Saxon basket, we may put them in the Chinese basket.” The bullet-headed commentator concluded: “It is necessary [for Russia] to finally recognize itself as a bear who loves its taiga and relies on its own strength.”

This week, the Russian bear, in the form of Mr. Putin, is in China, reveling in a chance to travel abroad. With the exception of a visit to Iran last year, this is the Russian president’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since he invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Last March, his circle tightened when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Putin on charges of war crimes and genocide stemming from the invasion of Ukraine. Fearful of arrest, he skipped summits in South Africa and India.

On Saturday, tiny Armenia joined the court, becoming the 123rd country where Mr. Putin cannot travel. Reflecting the Russian leader’s isolation, his spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said last month that Mr. Putin “gratefully” accepted an invitation by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to visit a nation often called “the Hermit Kingdom.” In 2019, the last pre-Covid “normal” year for Mr. Putin, he made 23 foreign trips.

Mr. Putin arrived at Beijing yesterday for the 10th anniversary celebration of China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road infrastructure program. With 23 heads of state and government in attendance, the forum gives Mr. Putin the chance to hold bilaterals and photo-ops to erode his image of isolation. On Tuesday, he met with the Vietnamese president, Vo Van Thuong, who invited him to visit Hanoi “soon.”  Vietnam and China are not members of the International Court. Today, he meets with the leaders of Laos, Mongolia, and Thailand.

Mr. Putin also met with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, the first Western leader to meet him since the international arrest warrant was handed down. The American ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, condemned the meeting, posting on X that Mr. Orbán “chooses to stand with a man whose forces are responsible for crimes against humanity in Ukraine, and alone among our allies. While Russia strikes Ukrainian civilians, Hungary pleads for business deals.”

Ignoring critics at home and abroad, Mr. Putin also is at Beijing to celebrate and expand trade ties with China, Russia’s biggest trading partner. Trade is up 30 percent this year, hitting the $200 billion mark. This makes Russia China’s second largest trading partner, after America. Not by chance, the Chinese official greeting Mr. Putin at the Beijing airport yesterday was the commerce minister, Wang Wentao. With Chinese exports to Russia surging by 57 percent this year, critics say Russia is the junior partner in this relationship.

Mr. Putin is traveling with a host of business leaders including the chief executives of Russia’s two largest state companies: Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, and Gazprom, holder of the legal monopoly on gas exports. China now buys 2 million barrels of oil a day from Russia, one-third of all of Russia’s exports. Gazprom hopes to build a second natural gas pipeline line to China, called Power of Siberia-2. Yet with Russian oil and gas largely shut out of Europe due to sanctions over Ukraine, China is driving hard bargains, winning big price discounts. As part of this bargaining, no decision is expected on a new gas line, which would pass through Mongolia.

Mr. Putin also hopes that Chinese investment will replace some of the Western investment that stampeded out of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Western sanctions and disinvestment last year forced 18 of Russia’s 20 car plants to shut down. China’s market share of the Russian car market jumped to 49 percent last June from 7 percent before the war. One year ago, engineering aid from China’s JAC Motors allowed production to resume at a nationalized plant that had belonged to France’s Renault. Now, Mr. Putin hopes for more Chinese joint ventures.

“These efforts are not without risks. While China is happy to export goods to the Russian consumer market, it seems reluctant to invest in the heavily sanctioned, high-risk market,” an associate director for the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, Niels Graham, writes. “For Russia, Chinese support may allow it to resume domestic production more quickly but also further entrenches its economy to its much larger southern neighbor, giving Beijing immense sway over its future economic prospects.”

This kind of dominance is not going unnoticed among the Moscow elite.