This is the 40th meeting of the two “dear friends” since 2012. This is the first trip abroad for one since the lifting of three years of strict pandemic-related restrictions. This is the first high-profile reception for the latter since the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an international arrest warrant for war crimes.

Preparations in the 15th-century Multifaceted Palace in the Kremlin are in full swing. Today’s official dinner, at which Vladimir Putin will receive his Chinese counterpart, on the second day of Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to Moscow, will take place in the hall where Ivan the Terrible spent three days celebrating the conquest of Central Asian lands by the Cossacks in the 16th century and Peter the Great glorified his victory in Northern War, in the 18th century, over the Swedes in the wide Baltic, which included present-day Ukraine.

Putin and Xi have a rich history of friendship and personal relationship. They are united not only by the Western alliance and the omnipotence of the United States. They are united by, let’s say, Russian ice cream, about which the President of the PRC spoke in the best words more than once. That’s why Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state Russian news agency TASS that “Russian President Vladimir Putin always has Russian ice cream ready for his guest, Chinese President Xi Jinping. Si likes it.”

According to TASS, several years ago at the Eastern Economic Forum, Chinese businessmen told Putin that Russian ice cream was a real success in their country. On his next visit to Beijing in 2016, Putin brought Xi ice cream as a gift. “I brought it because President Xi once mentioned that he likes Russian ice cream, so I brought some as a gift. We exchange some small things, ”Putin explained then.

In June 2019, Russian ice cream was the main dessert at the 66th birthday of the Chinese president, the exact date of which is considered a state secret in China, since nothing about the personal lives of the leaders was disclosed. However, Xi celebrated his birthday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who surprised him with ice cream, the Kremlin said. Both were in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, where they participated in the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), according to CNN.

Among other things, the Kremlin said that “the Russian leader highly appreciated the role of Xi Jinping in the development of bilateral relations and noted the success of the recent official visit of the President of China to Russia. Vladimir Putin gave Xi Jinping Russian ice cream as a birthday present, visiting him at his residence in the Tajik capital, and treating him to cake and champagne.

Xi then wholeheartedly thanked Putin for the favor. According to TASS, the head of China said that the Russian leader is very popular in China, and also treated him to Chinese tea. On the eve of the meeting, in an interview with TASS, Xi Jinping called Putin his “best and closest friend,” adding that he appreciated their “deep friendship.” They are connected, in addition, by a common love, in addition to ice cream, for hockey and bao buns.

In 2018, Xi, nicknamed Xi baozi (Xi from Bao Ban) because he unexpectedly visited a similar store in Beijing in 2013 in an attempt to build a reputation as a people’s leader early in his reign, called Putin to try to make the bao ban on the sidelines of the Shanghai summit. cooperation, but also to try Chinese pancakes together.

During his previous visit to Russia, again in 2019, Xi visited the Moscow Zoo with Putin, which received two Chinese giant pandas as part of his “research collaboration”.

Of course, Russian ice cream is not only the favorite of the Chinese leader. An Insider report says that social networking site Weibo, something like the Chinese version of Twitter, is flooded from time to time with posts about Russikan ice cream. In fact, the hashtag about “what delicious Russian ice cream” has gone viral, starting with a post by a Chinese tourist in Russia. “I can’t wait to finish all the ice cream that Russia makes!” written by one user.

However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was also pictured enjoying Russian ice cream when he visited Moscow in August 2019 for a short working visit.

Ice cream at the Multifaceted Palace

However, ice cream, along with traditional Russian cuisine and Russian cultural events, will be waiting for Xi Jinping at the Kremlin’s Multifaceted Palace. It is one of the most majestic rooms in the vast complex in the center of Moscow, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the room where the official meals of the President of Russia are listed as they were accepted by the tsars in the past.

The multifaceted palace, so named because it is “open” on all four sides, lined with white stone and brick, was created over four years (1487–1491) by Italian Renaissance architects Marco Friacin and Pietro Antonio Solario. It was built as a throne room for official receptions in the new state palace of Ivan III. The palace has an area of ​​495 sq.m.

On the famous stone staircase, the Red Gate, the emperors were led to the Assumption Cathedral for enthronement. It is covered with four domes with a pillar in the center, which is considered the most common type of ceremonial halls in Russian urban architecture of the 15th-16th centuries. It is decorated with frescoes from the 16th century and, as a palace, was part of the large Kremlin complex in the period 1838-1849.

In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin dismantled the Red Gate, turning the hall into … a dining room for Moscow proletarians. It was rebuilt and restored after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the period 1992-1994. This is the same hall where Boris Yeltsin received Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and then British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd.

The room in which, according to The Washington Post, former US President Ronald Reagan in 1988 put aside his anti-Communist obsession with the “evil empire” by speaking instead of “the art of friendly persuasion, the hope of a world with freedom, the hope of perseverance in finding a better path” , at dinner with Mikhail Gorbachev. The enmity between the two leaders predicted the end of the Cold War, the disintegration and disintegration of the Soviet Union into its component parts.

Which, according to some, Vladimir Putin is trying to recreate.