Putin, Xi and Iran's Pezeshkian Set to Meet in Kyrgyzstan Monday as China Widens Its Reach Into Russia's Backyard

Roughly a dozen heads of state are set to descend on Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, starting Monday, September 14, for a two-day summit marking 25 years of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, according to Breitbart. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian, India's Narendra Modi and Pakistan's Shehbaz Sharif are all scheduled to sit in a plenary session chaired by Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, per Breitbart's reporting. Kremlin spokesman Yuri Ushakov said Putin will also hold separate bilateral talks with Xi and Pezeshkian on the sidelines.

The timing is loaded. The summit lands four and a half years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine and six months into the standoff between Washington and Tehran, Breitbart reported. It also comes days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a rare trip to Moscow, a visit U.S. media have speculated touched on both Ukraine and Iran, though no U.S. or Russian official has confirmed the agenda publicly.

Russia's war math is getting uglier

On September 9, Ukraine's General Staff reported that Russian forces have suffered more than 1.5 million casualties since the February 2022 invasion began, according to a Yahoo News account of the assessment. The Institute for the Study of War, reviewing that figure, said Russian forces "continue suffering significant personnel losses" while achieving only "marginal battlefield gains." The report also cited hundreds of billions of dollars in destroyed Russian defense equipment.

Russia originally aimed to conquer Ukraine in 15 days, according to Voice of America's early reporting on the invasion. Four and a half years later, the United Nations said on August 5 that Russian attacks on Ukraine have actually intensified, not eased off.

China is filling the vacuum Russia left behind

While Moscow burns through men and machines in Ukraine, Beijing has been steadily displacing Russian influence across Central Asia, according to an assessment from the Caspian Policy Center cited in multiple reports. Chinese trade with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan surpassed $70 billion in 2022, climbed to $90 billion in 2023, and hit $106 billion in 2025.

That shift isn't just economic. A Eurasianet assessment published August 20 said China is "challenging Russia's stranglehold on Central Asia's arms market." Kazakhstan has acquired Chinese Wing Loong-1 armed drones and Y-8F-200 military transport aircraft, and is negotiating for Chinese K-8W combat jet trainers. Uzbekistan reportedly took delivery of four Chinese multi-role combat aircraft in August along with Chinese surface-to-air missile batteries.

On the infrastructure front, China marked a milestone on the long-stalled China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, drilling through a 210-metre tunnel in its Kyrgyz section, China's state broadcaster CCTV reported, with the South China Morning Post noting the announcement came shortly after Xi's own visit to Kyrgyzstan. The 500-kilometer rail line, first conceived in 1997, will give China the shortest land route to the Middle East and Europe that bypasses Russian territory entirely, according to the SCMP.

The trade war backdrop

Washington has its own reasons to watch this summit closely. The U.S. this month imposed secondary sanctions on Iran's trading partners across gold, technology, digital assets, aviation and maritime transport, according to Breitbart, and threatened further sanctions on Tehran's allies. China, a major buyer of Iranian oil, said it will "firmly defend its interests." President Trump has separately warned Moscow and Beijing against arming Iran.

Xi is also working the diplomatic angle in Europe. In a September 8 phone call with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Xi pushed "multilateralism" and "inclusive economic globalization," according to the Epoch Times. Starmer's office said the two discussed "pragmatic cooperation" on growth, but a Downing Street spokesperson said Starmer also raised domestic security, Russia's war in Ukraine, Hong Kong and human rights.

A source identified only by the surname Pan, described by the Epoch Times as close to China's Ministry of Commerce, claimed Beijing believes "a genuine, hard decoupling is a statistical fallacy" from the U.S., alleging that Chinese goods are being reassembled in third countries like Mexico and Vietnam to keep reaching American shelves. That claim is an insider allegation relayed through a single outlet, not an independently verified finding, and no U.S. agency has confirmed it on the record.

The SCO's own founding declaration says it is "not an alliance directed against other states," and the bloc has historically focused on trade and economic cooperation rather than military coordination. Roughly a third of the world's population lives in SCO member or dialogue-partner states, and plenty of that engagement, from railway construction to arms sales, is ordinary commercial activity rather than an organized anti-American bloc. Putin and Xi have nonetheless used past summits for pointed anti-Western rhetoric, with Putin blaming the West for provoking the Ukraine war and Xi denouncing what he called U.S. "acts of intimidation" at last year's gathering.

Whether Monday's Bishkek summit produces anything beyond another round of that rhetoric, or an actual coordinated response to U.S. sanctions on Iran and tariffs on Chinese and Indian goods, remains to be seen once the plenary session and Putin's bilateral meetings actually happen.