Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping held a telephone conversation on Monday in which they reportedly discussed the efforts of “relevant parties” to “make positive efforts to defuse the Ukraine crisis.”

China’s state-run Global Times missed the humor of Xi spending time on the call to tout China’s utterly irrelevant “proposals for resolving the crisis,” as if President Donald Trump would never have been able to open negotiations with Russia unless China wrote some white papers that nobody bothered to read.

The more meaningful part of the Global Times readout was Xi pledging China’s continuing political and economic support for Russia as “friends who share weal and woe, support each other, and achieve common development.”

Xi spoke at length about the solid foundations of the Russo-Chinese alliance:

Xi said China-Russia ties enjoy strong internal driving force and unique strategic value, adding that the relationship does not target any third party nor would it be influenced by any third party. The development strategies and foreign policies of China and Russia are for the long-term, he said.

Despite changes in the international situation, China-Russia relations will proceed with ease, which will help each other’s development and revitalization, and inject stability and positive energy into international relations, he said.

This part of the call seemed like a rebuke to analysts who speculated that China’s “unlimited partnership” with Russia might fray once the Ukraine war ends and Moscow no longer needs Beijing’s help to evade sanctions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russia-Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg are prominent among the Trump administration officials who have talked about weakening the China-Russia partnership as a benefit of ending the Ukraine war.

The Global Times did not bother to quote anything Putin said during his phone call with Xi, so it was hard to tell from that report if Putin reciprocated Xi’s promises of a rock-solid permanent alliance that would endure beyond the crisis in Ukraine.

Few other worldwide media outlets had anything to say about Putin’s remarks during the phone call and, for that matter, the Kremlin’s vaguely-worded official readout of the conversation only mentioned Putin “informing” Xi about “recent Russian-American contacts.”

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The Chinese Communist paper and its stable of expert commentators were generally pleased to see Trump quarreling with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Europeans, taking these travails as a sign that the NATO alliance is much closer to unraveling than the alliance between Beijing and Moscow.

Chinese experts also thought Zelensky might move into China’s orbit after his tense public exchanges with the Trump administration, citing Zelensky’s remarks on Sunday about the importance of bringing China into peace negotiations and the value of China’s trade to Ukraine. This analysis might be greatly underestimating Ukraine’s resentment toward China for stubbornly refusing to condemn Russia’s invasion.

Analysts told Reuters last week that Rubio, Kellogg, and other Trump officials are engaged in “wishful thinking” if they think peace in Ukraine might seriously degrade China’s relationship with Russia, but they are on firmer ground in thinking that China fears losing the immense economic leverage it has gained over Russia by purchasing vast amounts of sanctioned Russian oil. China is also afraid it might be frozen out of postwar rebuilding in Ukraine.

China also seems eager to get itself written into the history books as a peacemaker without risking anything of significance. Chinese diplomats are popping up all over Europe, ostentatiously offering diplomatic assistance to European leaders who are still furious at China for its unfair trade practices and product dumping.