July 6, 2015 4:02 pm

When Russia’s president welcomes leaders from a dozen countries for two separate summits in Ufa on Wednesday, there will be echoes of the 19th century Great Game.

In the west, attention is likely to focus on the summit of the Brics group of emerging economies. But for Vladimir Putin much more will be at stake at the gathering of the less well known Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.

Formed a decade ago by China, Russia and four Central Asian states, the SCO’s original focus was to settle border disputes between members. But as Mr Putin finds himself isolated in the west over his role in the Ukraine crisis, he is turning to a growing partnership with China to bolster Russia’s claim to great power status — giving the bloc a new significance.

The centrepiece in this strategy is the region between the shores of the Caspian and China’s western border. Once a pawn in the 19th century race between Russia and Britain to secure buffer zones for their empires, the area is now at the crossroads of separate integration initiatives launched by Russia and China.

“In 2015, we can speak of […] a ‘Central Eurasian moment’ — a unique confluence of international political and economic circumstances,” a recent report for the Valdai Club, an international discussion forum under Mr Putin’s patronage, notes.

Russia is pushing its Eurasian Economic Union, an integration project started with a customs union that aims to create a single market stretching from Belarus to Kyrgyzstan. China has vowed to create a “Silk Road economic belt” via massive infrastructure projects throughout Central and southern Asia all the way to the EU’s eastern borders.

Moscow is wary of the Beijing initiative. Over the past decade, China has replaced Russia as the main trading partner and investor in Central Asia, and the new plan will create transport corridors that compete with Russian rail links between Europe and Asia. But as Russia has become more dependent on China, it recognises the need to play along.

“The Chinese are looking after their own interests, and those are not always the same as ours,” says a Russian official. “But we can’t afford to stay on the sidelines.”

At their last meeting two months ago, Mr Putin and Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, pledged to seek convergence between the two projects. The SCO, which includes the majority of countries involved in both the EEU and the Chinese plan and has mature institutions, is the platform to do it, say Russian foreign policy experts.

“The endeavour to bring three neighbouring projects — the EEU, SCO and the Silk Road economic belt — together is of fundamental importance from the perspective of Russian-Chinese co-ordination of interests in Eurasia,” the Russian International Affairs Council, a government-backed think-tank, says.

Successful in its original task of settling regional border disputes, the SCO has struggled to play a pivotal role in driving regional economic co-operation. Now it is seeking to gain new momentum. Leaders are due to approve applications by India and Pakistan to join as full members, and Russia hopes Iran will join once UN sanctions on Tehran are lifted.

A reinvigorated SCO, and the China-Russia link-up behind it, will have an impact far beyond the region itself, say political analysts.

Reinventing the forum could create “an additional opportunity for reviving the dialogue with the west and defusing the confrontational trends”, says Sergei Luzyanin, an SCO expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Russian foreign policy officials argue that everyone from China to western Europe and the US has shared security interests, such as keeping Afghanistan stable, reining in the drug trade and stemming the spread of Islamist terrorism.

However, most SCO members belong to the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, the military alliance into which Russia grouped some of the former Soviet republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Some Russian defence analysts argue that this bloc-like structure, which could pit the SCO against Nato, should be reinforced.

Anatoly Klimenko, a retired lieutenant general, says the SCO’s legal framework for military co-operation should be strengthened, for example “through mutual assistance treaties guaranteeing border integrity and provision of military support in the event of a military threat”.

Moreover, Moscow hopes that enhancing the SCO’s role will restore some Russian leverage against the west if China is given a role in current global discussions over broader Eurasian security.

“Russia’s and China’s leaders refuse to talk about building an alliance, and our two countries say that our co-operation will not influence the outside world. But that is impossible,” says Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of modern international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “We are both under strategic pressure from the US. As long as the US retains its hegemony, our relationship will continue going in this direction.”

Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, the think-tank, diagnoses that the quasi-alliance between Moscow and Beijing will result in locking the US out of the region.

“For China, peacefully gaining pre-eminence in Eurasia will bring it closer to assuming its rightful place in the world,” he says. “The United States, which even 15 or 20 years ago could claim to be the Eurasian hegemon, will be watching from the sidelines.”