EDITOR’S note:

The following is a special interview with Professor Allen C. Lynch, Department of Politics, University of Virginia, by Shanghai Daily opinion writer Li Xinran. Professor Lynch is a Russia expert and author of the book “Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft (Shapers of International History).”

Q: What do you make of the US$400 billion gas deal China and Russia signed in May?

A: There are previous examples of Russian expansions of energy to China. It is part of Russia’s attempt to diversify its sources of clients to buy its energy. This is normal business practice. However, probably it was accelerated because of the sanctions declared by the European Union and the United States.

There are natural complementarities between China’s economy and Russia’s economy. The Chinese economy is a growing industrial economy and the Russian economy is mainly a raw materials economy, exporting, especially natural gas and petroleum. So I tend not to exaggerate these kinds of deals.

Certainly Putin is trying to send a signal to the European Union that Russia has choices. This is normal diplomacy.

China is an important partner for Russia, and relations are good and getting better. They have never been better in the entire history of Russia-China relations, going back many centuries, going back to the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.

But this doesn’t mean that China can be a substitute for Europe. And it  doesn’t mean that China can be a substitute for Russia’s relationship with the US. It also means for China that Russia cannot be a substitute for China’s relations with the US or in China’s relations with the broader capitalist world economy.

Q: China and Russia agreed last month to jointly tackle challenges to safeguard their sovereignty, security and development interests. What’s your appraisal of the situation?

A: Again, this is a continuation of cooperation that has been going on for many years now, for example, in the form of the Shanghai Cooperation Council. It’s to reaffirm a point that this relationship is a normal relationship.

Yes, the Russians and Chinese do not like the idea of a unipolar world, definitely. Neither country likes the idea that the US very often takes decisions by itself.

But China’s modernization strategy is based on its relationship with Washington and what Washington represents. So, China is attempting to develop its relations with Russia without undermining its relations with Washington.

China cannot be isolated, just as Russia can’t be, but that is very different from saying we are in a new strategic triangle like in the Kissinger period. No it’s not like that. What you have are relations among countries that have many economic interests in common, not always their strategic interests in common.

Q: Russia has created a Eurasian Economic Union to start from next year with the participation of ex-Soviet states. Is it similar to the North American Free Trade Agreement?

A: Free trade is definitely the major part of this union and in fact, it is less ambitious than the European Union. It does not require states to have similar laws. It does not require the states to have a common foreign policy or security policy.

But I would say there is at the same time a political idea behind this, and it is the idea that you know, in the 1990s, at the beginning Russia wanted to be integrated into the West, eonomically, politically with security, and that failed.

Since then, even before Putin came to power, consensus in Russia’s political class has been Russia should not be integrated into any other power center; rather Russia should be the integrator of its own power center and that’s what the Eurasian Economic Union attempts to do. The Eurasian Economic Union is something that Russia can do regardless what the Americans say.

Q: Is Putin trying to create a “new world order” like someone said?

A: Putin is not trying to create a new world order. He is reacting against a world order that he and most other Russians and many Chinese and many other people see as a world order with too much American direction or at least too much American power that has been used in the wrong way.

Ironically, Americans like to constrain power inside their country but outside their country their powers are unconstrained to some extent. So what he wishes to do is to try and build up checks and balances on the international scale — the way Americans have checks and balances against their national government inside their own country.

Q: What’s Putin’s role in Russia’s historic progress? Will he be re-elected?

A: Even Russians who don’t like Putin like what he did in Crimea. Even many intellectuals who oppose Putin emotionally accept what he did in Crimea, because they see it historically and culturally a Russian land that was removed from Russia for strange reasons in 1954.

The second question is simple. He definitely can be re-elected if he wants to be. But the first question is more complicated. So I would say, as a lot of my countrymen said, Putin has achieved a lot for Russia.

What has he achieved?

First he restored the power and authority of the Russia state, which had almost been destroyed in the 1990s.

Secondly, he presided over the Russian economy very impressively until the collapse of the world economy in 2008. He was able to use enough money, from oil revenues, to put in special accounts under state control so that when the oil price fell in 2008, Russia had the No. 3 dollar reserves in the world after China and Japan. So the Russian economy survived that collapse, and Yeltsin and Gorbachev did not survive — that’s a major accomplishment.

Also, Putin restored international respect for Russia which was shown by the Olympic Games in Sochi, by the World Cup that will be held in a few years in Russia, and also by the Russia and Georgia war in 2008, which really was a war against NATO expansion.

On the negative side, No. 1 he has created a very impressive system of power mainly based on one person.

Unlike in China, which used to be based on one person but which over many decades has now evolved into a institutionalized form of politics. So you have limits of terms of 10 years, you have procedures for selecting leaders and certain principles for promotion. But in contrast, in Russia, Putin’s system depends too much on one person.

The second weakness concerns the economy. He has not managed to begin a transition away from an economy mainly based on raw materials and the export of raw materials. For example, oil and natural gas revenues, right now, are about 50 percent of the money the government gets every year. The third failure concerns the legal system. The rule of law is weakly developed in Russia.

Q: China and Russia are getting closer. Is it because of US threats?

A: First of all, China and Russia have been getting closer since 1989 when Gorbachev met Deng Xiaoping and normalized Chinese and Soviet relations. So the long-term tendency toward better Russia-Chinese relations is independent of the American factor.

At the same time, there is no question that Russia and China do coordinate their policy to make sure to limit the capacity of the US to harm their interests. Again this does not mean a new Sino-Russia alliance against the US like the Cold War.

Q: Are China and Russia natural allies or through force of circumstance?

A: Force of circumstance. Russian-Chinese relations are excellent right now. They have eliminated their border disputes with the treaty signed six or seven years ago under Putin and that’s a new chapter in Chinese-Russian relations. The two countries conduct joint military maneuvers. This was unimaginable 25 or 30 years ago.

However, I think any Chinese person who knows Russia well, knows that many Russians are worried in the long term about the future of Russia, especially in Siberia. But these fears, in my opinion, are exaggerated. There has not been a large immigration from China into Russia.

Q: Are Sino-Russia relations a continuation of the relations between China and the former Soviet Union?

A: They are quite different.

Relations between China and the Soviet Union were difficult even before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

Let’s remember that in the 1890s, Russia definitely wanted to acquire Manchuria.

And we also know that Stalin had a very complicated attitude toward Chinese communists and Mao Zedong before 1949. So even before 1949, relations were difficult.

If we compare Chinese-Russian relations today to that period, we see they are completely different.

The Chinese-Russian relations are better than they have ever been and they are in a qualitatively different position than they were before 1989.