Russia SHOCKED by China's UNEXPECTED Move - XI has had Enough of Putin!

Vladimir Putin has requested talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping after China imposed restrictions on accepting sanctioned tankers from the "shadow" Russian fleet in its ports. Putin announced that he would hold his first telephone conversation with Xi Jinping in 11 months during a meeting with members of the government. "My colleague, the leader of the People's Republic of China, and I will have a telephone conversation soon," Putin said. Earlier, on the television program "Direct Line" in December, Putin claimed that he considered the Chinese leader a "friend" and described relations with Beijing as the best in Russia's history. "This is primarily due to mutual trust," Putin said, adding that mutual trade turnover reached $220-240 billion per year. Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev recently visited Beijing, and as RBC reported, Medvedev delivered a secret “personal message” from Putin to Xi Jinping. Putin last communicated with the PRC president in October 2024, during the BRICS summit in Kazan, where the Kremlin was trying to lobby for the bloc’s “single currency” project. According to Russian officials, this could become part of a new international payment system that would replace the Western system and would not be subject to Western sanctions. Three days after Shandong Port Group, one of China’s largest port operators, announced that it would effectively join American sanctions against the Russian stay-behind fleet, Putin needed a new round of talks with Xi Jinping. The company, which operates ports in Shandong province, where most of the sanctioned oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela is imported, has warned that it will stop accepting vessels blacklisted by the US Treasury from January 6. The restrictions on "shadow" tankers will affect Qingdao, China's fifth-largest port by cargo volume, as well as Rizhao and Yantai, where China bought a combined one and a half million barrels a day last year, or almost a fifth of the world's oil. Lloyd's List Intelligence estimates that more than 650 tankers are currently part of the active shadow fleet carrying oil to evade sanctions. Of these, 250-300 ships regularly carry Russian barrels. By the end of 2024, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union had included about 180 tankers carrying Russian oil, bypassing sanctions and violating the "price ceiling" ($60 per barrel), on the sanctions list. According to Bloomberg's calculations, more than 100 of them had to anchor and no longer carry barrels from the Russian Federation. A new blow to the Kremlin's "shadow fleet" could be the "farewell" sanctions of the outgoing administration of Joe Biden, which, according to The Washington Post, plans to blacklist more than a hundred more ships. As we can see, China's influence on Russia is considerable.