Аннотация:After the start of the political crisis in Ukraine, Russia’s increased involvement in it and subsequent sharp deterioration of its relations with the West, there has been much talk about Russia’s “turn to the East” and efforts to upgrade its relations with China to the level of a “strategic alliance.” However, even the existing framework of “strategic cooperation” is too ambiguous to sustain in the medium term as the main structural prerequisites for Sino-Russian interactional most in all fields are problematic. The countries’ mutual vision of cooperation is in many ways incomplete or plainly erroneous. Russia’s perception of the Chinese reform experience is more emotional than sober, which is rooted in its traumatic defeat in the Cold War. There is a kind of “surrealistic realism” discourse in Russia, including fantastic expectations that Beijing will support Moscow militarily or bail out Russian state and corporate budgets simply because Russia is defending its “national interests” in Ukraine against “Western encroachments.”A certain combination of these factors in the medium-term perspective (three to five years) may lead to what now seems quite an improbable situation, with Russian-Western relations substantially stabilized and Sino-Russian interaction perceptibly cooling off. It seems plausible to assume that Russia and China may distance themselves from each other due to insufficient trust, objective limits of cooperation, and mutual fatigue.