Putin left Beijing on Wednesday evening having called his partnership with Xi Jinping a 'key stabilising force in international affairs.' He had signed 20 agreements. He had quoted Chinese proverbs. He had embraced his dear friend. By Sunday, he had launched the largest bombardment of Kyiv in four years of war.
Six hundred drones. Ninety missiles. An Oreshnik hypersonic ballistic missile — nuclear-capable, uninterceptable by any existing air defence — fired at Bila Tserkva, a city of 200,000 people fifty miles south of the capital. Four dead. A hundred injured. Thirty residential buildings destroyed or damaged. A school struck while people sheltered inside. Every district of Kyiv hit. The largest single attack on Ukraine's capital since the invasion began.
The Oreshnik is not a routine weapon and its use is not routine. Putin first fired it in November 2024, against Dnipro. The second time was January 2026, against Lviv. Sunday was the third — against a target fifty miles from the capital, in a city of 200,000 people. Each use is a calibrated signal: that Russia's nuclear-capable arsenal is now a regular instrument of the war, not a last resort. The escalation is not accidental. It is a message, delivered three times now, to anyone who might be considering consequences.
The word for what Putin called his partnership with Xi is 'stabilising.' It is worth sitting with that word for a moment.
Five days before the attack, Xi told Trump — according to multiple people familiar with the Beijing summit — that Putin may ultimately regret invading Ukraine. Xi offered this assessment privately, to the American president, as a signal of moderate intent. The Chinese Foreign Ministry denied it. Trump denied it. The Financial Times stood by it. Then Putin flew home and fired 600 drones at a capital city.
The sequence is its own verdict. Xi's reported remark — if true — was not leverage. It was not restraint. It was a message managed for Western consumption while the military relationship between Beijing and Moscow continued undisturbed. Reuters revealed this week that roughly 200 Russian troops attended secret training exercises in China in late 2025, learning drone warfare tactics that some carried directly back to the Ukrainian battlefield. China trains Russian soldiers. China denies it influences Russian decisions. Both things are true simultaneously and neither cancels the other out.
Ukraine has watched all of this from a position of deepening isolation. Trump's negotiators promised to visit Kyiv after Easter. They never came. No new date was given. No explanation was offered. The peace process has stalled since February — Ukraine was the priority until the Iran war made it inconvenient. Zelensky called for consequences after Sunday's attack. He received a statement of condemnation. The world's diplomatic capital is in Tehran, Beijing and Islamabad. Kyiv absorbs what is left.
Putin does not need Xi's permission to bomb Kyiv. That is the point. The 'no limits' partnership has always been constructed so that Xi retains maximum deniability while Russia retains maximum operational freedom. Beijing provides the economic lifeline, the technology supply chain, the diplomatic cover. Moscow provides the military action. The arrangement is stable precisely because it is never formalised, never written down, never acknowledged. A stabilising force, in the language of the joint statement. An alibi, in the language of what actually happens.
A 74-year-old Kyiv pensioner told the Kyiv Independent he felt the blast before he understood it. The flames. The brief loss of consciousness. Then, the detail that stays: he was not scared. Kyiv residents, he said, are already used to this. Their emotions have become a little dulled. Four years of a stabilising force, felt from below.
Putin called it a partnership. Xi called him a dear friend. The Oreshnik travels, as Putin once said, like a meteorite. Nobody in Bila Tserkva was consulted about the friendship.
