Although no Arab government – save Syria – has been outrightly supportive of Russia’s invasion, occupation and annexation of Ukrainian land, Arab statesmen do not believe their governments should burn bridges with Moscow because of this conflict. Saudi-Russian partnership remains strong “Most of the developing world in Asia and Africa, including the Middle East, has not viewed the Ukraine war as the kind of definitive, transformational moment in international relations that the West does,” Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, wrote this month. irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru Fighting is starting to concentrate around the city of Kherson. There's an almost constant rumbling of artillery about 10 miles (16km) away. The truth is Xi's path to power was far from inevitable. And it's defined as much by his ambition as it is by the party's failure to prevent what they did not want - a repeat of Mao's disastrous one-man rule. Mao had closed China's economy off from the world. Now his successors were throwing it open. In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organisation. Along the southeast coast new cities mushroomed. Some specialised in buttons and zippers, others made cigarette lighters. In Zhejiang I found one that only made socks, tens of billions of them. His Chongqing model, however, was arguably the prototype for what Xi would soon unleash on the whole of China.