The thing everyone is missing about Vladimir Putin asking China for military help

When the news broke over the weekend that Vladimir Putin had reduced himself to asking China for military help in Ukraine, three things were immediately clear. First, Putin knows he’s losing and is resorting to desperate lengths to try to save himself. Second, barring a massive fundamental reversal in his overall priorities, Xi Jinping was going to be extremely hesitant to take Putin up on this. Third, the U.S. intel community now appears to know everything Putin is saying and doing.

Of course, by leaking to the world that Putin has asked China for military help, the U.S. intel community has incidentally handed the media an opportunity to run wild with hyperbolic doomsday hysteria about China taking Putin up on the offer. Not that it’s the U.S. intel community’s job to worry about how the media might spin these kinds of things. Its job was to put this information out there publicly, in order to make it even harder for China to say yes to Putin.

Now a new tidbit is surfacing. Bloomberg is reporting that Putin actually asked China for this military help back in late February – just as he was beginning the invasion. This puts things in an even darker context for Putin, as he knew he was very likely to lose this battle even as he was beginning it.

It’s not clear if the U.S. government is just now leaking this information because it just now obtained it, or if it’s been strategically sitting on it all this time and decided that now was the time to leak it. Either way, it serves to put China on the defensive, as the world community will now at least mildly condemn China for having even been cordial to Russia when the request was made. It’ll force President Xi to think about just how bad the economic blowback against his country will be if he makes any moves to help Putin going forward. It’s a clever way for the U.S. to box Xi in, so to speak, and further cut off Putin from any potential Chinese help.

Again, the only downside to the U.S. leaking this intel is that we now have to hear media pundits go on and on about how we’re all doomed because China is maybe or probably or definitely going to side with Russia, depending on how hyperbolically any given pundit wants to try to spin things for attention.

Of course in reality the U.S. merely leaked that China was open to Putin’s request, which could mean something as mild as an “okay, gotta go, maybe we’ll get back to you later” blowoff. Unfortunately, because the pundit class is so busy chasing ratings by overhyping the remote odds that China would decide to destroy its own economy for the sake of getting on board Putin’s sinking ship, key details that don’t fit with this hype will largely be left out of the conversation. The fact that Putin reportedly made this request of China weeks ago, and that nothing ever came of it, may be the most important detail in all of this – but it’ll likely get little attention.