Russia is playing a game. If Putin manage to extract a promise from Biden that the US and NATO will respect Russia’s primacy in the former Czarist sphere of influence, Russia will immediately drop collaboration with China in any field that makes the US nervous.
That's a very American perspective. Russia has a lot of good reasons to be on friendly terms with China: trade, investments, security being the largest neighbor with each other. Russia might tone down its anti-US rhetoric, but most of Russia's behaviors and activities in Europe and Middle East that the US/West feel objectionable have been out of its own interest, not out of any collaboration with China. Russia will always act as a great power, not subserviently to anyone including the US.
The main question is whether the US can admit to herself that she has been overplaying her hand with respect to Russia during the last 20 years, and her capacity to simultaneously contain both russian and china is weak.
That would be very un-American. Besides, if the Russia establishes a stable and cooperative relationship with Europe, American influence in Europe will wane further. It'll become even more difficult for the US to rally the European allies to contain and isolate China. China is not considered a geopolitical threat in Europe. America as an empire needs enemies to unite its clients and protectorates. This is true in Europe, as it is in Asia and Middle East.
Russia and Putin sees this, and wants to leverage the fact that in the long run Russia’s capacity to reduce American global influence is much less than those of the chinese. So it wants something from the US for not taking China’s side.
Russia wants a good relationship with the US and the West. That has never been any question about it. But Russia does not want to be treated as a second rate power or worse ("Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons" etc.). Russia also does not want to sacrifice its own strategic relationship with China, which has its own logic. Demanding Russia to sacrifice its own relationship with another great power is treating it as another US allies/vassals. Russia is not going to accept it.
Americans of all sorts have been trying hard to figure out ways to drive wedges between Russia and China, with all kinds naive and laughable excuses, say Siberia, China's 4th aircraft carriers. But the root cause of all the problems lie in the fact that the US capacity to preserve its empire increasingly does not mesh well with reality. The solution is to reduce overreach, or change itself, not to travel around the world for a senile President with rhetoric and empty statements to create imaginary enemies and rally the increasingly unwilling coalition.
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