Russian President Vladimir Putin has been among friends this week at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Friends with benefits—and costs. Putin has spent years cultivating an anti-Western bloc only to see China’s Xi Jinping emerge as the de facto leader of this counterbalance to American hegemony.
Analysts said before the summit that SCO leaders wanted Bishkek to look like a show of strength aimed at Washington. Moscow has deepened strategic ties with China and Iran across trade, diplomacy, the military, and more. But Russia, under the heavy strain of Putin’s war in Ukraine, and isolated almost entirely by the Western world, has become increasingly dependent on this smaller group of now-indispensable partners.
Such was clear on Tuesday, when Putin met with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at the SCO, telling his counterpart from Tehran that Moscow stood in solidarity with the Iranian people during the United States and Israel's war. Putin said Russia and Iran would preserve economic and trade ties despite the current “military and political environment.” The U.S. and Iran had exchanged fire for the first time in a month just hours earlier, and President Donald Trump had warned of further strikes. Pezeshkian, meanwhile, used the gathering to say Iran was prepared to return to a June ceasefire arrangement with the U.S. if Washington also fulfilled its commitments, illustrating how even a close Russian partner retains its own diplomatic calculations.
The timing adds significance to those Russian relationships. Russia is at a stalemate on the battlefield in Ukraine, burning through men and metal with no clear end in sight. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) security think tank estimates Russia suffered about 1.4 million battlefield casualties, including as many as 450,000 deaths, between February 2022 and June 2026 and says Russian-controlled territory shrank by a net 400 square kilometers during April and May.
Kyiv’s forces are hitting deeper into the Russian economy, from Wildberries e-commerce warehouses to oil and gas infrastructure, causing shortages that are stretching the patience of ordinary Russians. Russia’s key interest rate stood at 14 percent at the end of August. The federal budget recorded a 6.455 trillion-ruble deficit equal to 2.8 percent of GDP through July as oil and gas revenues fell 16.8 percent from a year earlier.
Putin knows Russia is suffering and struggling, which is why he is moving to escalate his war in Ukraine, and perhaps even his hybrid war against the NATO allies supporting Kyiv—because his other option is admitting a kind of defeat. But Putin is pushing for escalation just as most of his key partners are calling for de-escalation. That puts him in a vulnerable position.
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