Friday was the final day of Mr. Xi’s three-day visit to Russia. On Wednesday, he said that “President Putin is for me a best friend.” The next day, Mr. Putin took Mr. Xi on a boat tour around the canals of St. Petersburg.
“We hated to leave, as there are so many issues to discuss,” Mr. Putin said of that meeting, The New York Times wrote.
But when he was asked at the conference on Friday if he would take sides in the trade war between the United States and China, Mr. Putin said he was citing a Chinese proverb that “when tigers fight in the valley, the smart monkey sits aside and waits to see who wins.”