Ukraine says China is in Russia’s pocket. It may be the other way around.

At the Shangri-La conference in Singapore on Sunday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused China of doing Russia’s bidding in seeking to disrupt a peace conference scheduled for June.

“Regrettably, it is unfortunate that such a big, independent, powerful country as China is an instrument in the hands of Putin,” Zelenskyy said, referring to Russia’s president.

Zelenskyy’s remarks highlight the increasing interdependence between Russia and China, which has a vastly bigger economy, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But the relationship has been lopsided. Rather than simply doing Putin’s bidding, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has so far essentially had Russia in his hands.

In the wake of its Ukraine invasion, Russia has been increasingly isolated on the world stage, but China has stepped in, providing vital economic and diplomatic support. The US says China has also been providing military support in the form of dual-use components for Russia’s military industry.

A Financial Times report on Monday included important new details about the underlying power dynamic of the relationship. It said the reason a massive new gas pipeline deal between Russia and China had stalled was that China was driving a hard bargain.

Sources told the FT that China had asked to get the gas at the same heavily subsidized rates as Russia and would commit to buying only a small fraction of the pipeline’s 50 billion cubic meters annual output.

It’s bad news for Russian President Vladimir Putin, with the Russian gas industry having been badly impacted by sanctions and increasingly dependent on exports to non-Western countries, notably China.

China’s leader, Xi, has exploited the power imbalance in the China-Russia relationship. He’s brokered influence in the Central Asian Republics, which have traditionally been part of Russia’s sphere of influence, and found a vast new market for Chinese exports such as vehicles in Russia.

But Xi is also increasingly dependent on his wager of a Russian victory in Ukraine coming good.

And he’s still keen to help Russia’s leader, with the FT reporting that boycotting the peace conference was one of the requests Putin made to Xi when the leaders met in May.

China is undergoing a serious economic downturn, and its support for Russia is imperiling its ties with wealthy Western economies, which its major businesses depend upon.

If Xi comes out of the Ukraine war with little to show, his credibility and bid to assert China as the world’s major power will be seriously dented.

And that’s likely enough to ensure China will continue to do Russia favors.