Russian President Vladimir Putin has had a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, emphasizing the two countries’ close ties, a day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th U.S. president.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday that Moscow and Beijing's foreign policy ties played a stabilising role in international affairs.

Chinese state-sponsored groups including Mustang Panda and Tonto Team have been targeting Russian aerospace and defense firms looking for intelligence on Moscow's military capabilities, researchers at the Taiwanese cybersecurity firm TeamT5 told POLITICO.

China's largest airline, China Southern Airlines, has suspended flights from Beijing to Moscow at the end of January, a surprise move that comes just ahead of the Chinese New Year. Newsweek reached out to China Southern Airlines and the Russian Foreign Ministry with an emailed request for comment outside of office hours.

Although Aeroflot has reduced Russia-China capacity by 5% compared with pre-pandemic levels, it is currently offering 16 nonstop routes between the countries, compared with seven in 2019. Recent additions include Krasnoyarsk-Harbin, Khabarovskiy-Sanya and Moscow Sheremetyevo-Sanya.

The U.S. “will have to out-think” Russia and China to prevent them from using nuclear weapons to resolve a future crisis, the outgoing head of the National Nuclear Security Administration said last week.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had a call Tuesday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, emphasizing the two countries’ close ties, a day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th

In December, Russia reportedly sold its stakes in certain Kazakh uranium deposits to Chinese-owned companies. This involved Kazakhstan's nuclear resources company, Kazatomprom, and Russia's Rosatom transferring interests to Chinese entities, National Security News reported.

The US President has previously called for tariffs as high as 60% on China, and analysts have expressed mixed feelings about the news.

Russia signed a strategic partnership treaty with Iran on Friday that follows similar pacts with China and North Korea. All three countries are adversaries of the United States, and Russia has used its ties with them to help blunt the impact of Western sanctions and boost its war effort in Ukraine.

President Donald Trump is in the fifth day of his second term in office, striving to remake the traditional boundaries of Washington by asserting unprecedented executive power. The president has