China’s Claim to Neutrality Fades with Moscow Visit

“Vladimir Putin loves a really long table. Images of his meetings are famous, with the Russian leader at one end and the person he is speaking to so far away that you wonder if it is hard for them to hear one another,” the BBC reports.

“It was not like that when he met China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi. There they were, sitting within handshake distance, with an oval-shaped table in the middle…”

“When the footage was released, it appeared to be a deliberately symbolic move to show that he felt safe enough to be that close to the representative of such an important friend.”