China won’t let Putin lose his ugly Ukraine war

Who needs enemies when you have friends like Vladimir Putin?

This is what Xi Jinping must be thinking just six weeks after the two announced a “no limits” friendship to make the world safe for autocracies by taking on America and the other democracies, weakening Washington’s alliances in Europe and Asia and overturning the primacy of liberal democratic norms in place since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

In recent days, the Russian president requested military assistance from his Chinese counterpart to fight a war when much of the world is uniting against him. The cascading sanctions could soon begin to affect Chinese companies doing business with Russian entities.