Chinese President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin walk in the grounds of Xi’s Zhongnanhai residence in Beijing, China, 2 September 2025. Photo: EPA/ALEXANDER KAZAKOV/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN

Beijing has still not confirmed announcements made by Vladimir Putin and the head of Russian energy giant Gazprom of a deal signed earlier this week to build a new gas pipeline from Russia to China, the Financial Times (FT) has reported.

On Tuesday, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller announced the signing of a “legally binding memorandum” with the China National Petroleum Corporation on the construction of the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which will connect Russian gas fields in western Siberia to China via Mongolia.

Putin confirmed Gazprom’s statement at a Wednesday evening press conference he gave in Beijing at the end of his four-day visit to the country to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin.

However, as the FT noted, neither Chinese President Xi Jinping, nor the Chinese media have commented on the memorandum, and the official communiqué released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry following Putin’s visit to China spoke only of “cooperation in infrastructure and energy”, without mentioning the pipeline by name.

Moscow and Beijing have been in negotiations over the construction of Power of Siberia 2 for almost 20 years, but the deal has repeatedly floundered as the terms being proposed by China grew increasingly unfavourable to the Kremlin as its negotiating position weakened, most notably since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

According to industry analysts who spoke to Novaya Europe, the “legally binding memorandum” signed in Beijing earlier this week is in fact only an interim document that falls some way short of a contract, though it is of outsized importance to the Kremlin as a symbol of its ever-closer strategic partnership with China.