What was the Chinese minister of defense doing in Moscow?
There is an even more important question to be asked...
If you would like to answer the title question you could say that he was meeting his counterpart in Russia but that doesn't seem to tell the whole story.
Yes, there was a meeting between Putin and Xi a few weeks ago, and yes this could be a follow-up meeting agreed upon during the president's talks, but there is this strange talk between Putin and the Chinese defense minister.
Such things usually don't occur so often in diplomacy. One can argue that Putin is the de facto commander in chief of Russian armed forces but he outranks the defense minister. In China they tend to stick to the diplomatic rules which you could observe during the von der Leyen visit…
To add to the mystery the visit lasted 4 days and it was the first foreign trip of the Chinese defense minister.
I'm thinking about it since a while and I can't figure it out. Either something fishy is going on or I'm overreacting. Let us wait and see.
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