LONDON/BEIJING (Reuters)

-- Xi Jinping will leave China for the first time in more than two years for a trip this week to Central Asia where he will meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin, just a month be- fore he is set to cement his place as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.

Against a backdrop of Russia’s

confrontation with the West over Ukraine, the crisis over Taiwan and a stuttering global economy, Xi is due on a state visit to Ka- zakhstan on Wednesday.

China’s president will then meet Putin at the Shanghai Coopera- tion Organization’s summit in the ancient Silk Road city of Samar- kand in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the Kremlin said. China con- firmed the trip on Monday.

Putin’s foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters last week that the Russian president was ex- pected to meet Xi at the summit. The Kremlin declined to give de- tails on their talks.

The meeting will give Xi an op- portunity to underscore his clout while Putin can demonstrate Rus- sia’s tilt towards Asia; both lead- ers can show their opposition to the United States just as the West seeks to punish Russia for the Ukraine war.

“It is all about Xi in my view: he wants to show just how confi- dent he is domestically and to be seen as the international leader of nations opposed to Western hege- mony,” said George Magnus, au- thor of “Red Flags”, a book about Xi’s challenges.

“Privately I imagine Xi will be most anxious about how Putin’s war is going and indeed if Putin or Russia are in play at some point in the near future because China still needs an anti-western leader- ship in Moscow.”

The deepening “no limits” part- nership between the rising super- power of China and the natural resources titan of Russia is a geo- political development the West is watching with anxiety.

Once the senior partner in the global Communist hierarchy, Russia after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union is now a junior partner to a resurgent Commu- nist China which is forecast to overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy in the next decade.

Though historical contradictions abound in the partnership, there is no sign that Xi is ready to drop support for Putin in Russia’s most serious confrontation with the West since the height of the Cold War.

Instead, the two 69-year-old leaders are deepening ties. Trade soared by nearly a third between Russia and China in the first 7 months of 2022.

The visit “shows that China

is willing to not only continue ‘business as usual’ with Russia but even show explicit support and accelerate the  formation  of a stronger China-Russia align- ment,” said Alexander Korolev, senior lecturer in politics and in- ternational relations at UNSW Sydney.

Xi last met Putin in February just weeks before the Russian president ordered the military op- eration in Ukraine.

At that meeting at the opening of the Winter Olympics, Xi and Putin declared their no limits part- nership, backing each other over standoffs on Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the West.

China has refrained from condemning Russia’s operation

against Ukraine or calling it an “invasion” in line with the Krem- lin which casts the war as “a spe- cial military operation”.

“The bigger message really isn’t that Xi is supporting Putin, be- cause it’s been pretty clear that Xi supports Putin,” said Professor Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Xi, the son of a communist revo- lutionary, last left China in Janu- ary 2020, before the world went into COVID lockdown.

After the West imposed on Mos- cow the most severe sanctions in modern history due to the war in Ukraine, Putin says Russia is turning towards Asia after cen- turies of looking to the West as the crucible of economic growth, technology and war.

Casting the West as a declining, U.S.-dominated coalition which aims to shackle - or even destroy - Russia, Putin’s worldview chimes with that of Xi, who presents Chi- na as an alternative to the U.S.- led, post-World War Two order. Putin aide Ushakov said the Xi- Putin meeting would be “very im- portant”. He did not give further details.

As Europe seeks to turn away from Russian energy imports, Pu- tin will seek to boost energy ex- ports to China and Asia.

Putin said last week that a ma- jor gas export route to China via Mongolia had been agreed. Gaz- prom has for years been studying the possibility for a major new gas pipeline - the Power of Sibe- ria 2 - to travel through Mongolia taking Russian gas to China.

It will carry 50 billion cubic me- ters of gas per year, around a third of what Russia usually sells Eu- rope – or equivalent to the Nord Stream 1 annual volumes.

The Shanghai Cooperation Or- ganization, which includes Rus- sia, China, India, Pakistan and four Central Asian states, is due to admit Iran, one of Moscow’s key allies in the Middle East.