China's President Xi Jinping has criticised "bullying behaviour" in the world order as he gathered Eurasian leaders for a showpiece summit aimed at putting China front and centre of regional relations.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, comprising China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus, is touted as a non-Western style of collaboration and seeks to be an alternative to traditional alliances.
Mr Xi told the SCO leaders, including Russian and Belarusian presidents Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko, that the global international situation was becoming more "chaotic and intertwined".
The Chinese leader also slammed "bullying behaviour" from certain countries.
"The security and development tasks facing member states have become even more challenging," he added in his address to all the gathered dignitaries in the northern port city of Tianjin.
"Looking to the future, with the world undergoing turbulence and transformation, we must continue to follow the Shanghai spirit and better perform the functions of the organisation," Mr Xi said.
Leaders from the ten SCO countries including Mr Putin, Mr Lukashenko and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived earlier on a red carpet and posed for a group photo.
Watch: Putin, Xi and Modi meet at summit
Mr Xi, Mr Putin and Mr Modi were seen chatting on live footage, the three leaders flanked by their official translators.
The SCO summit, which also involves 16 more countries as observers or "dialogue partners", kicked off yesterday, days before a massive military parade in the capital Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.
Mr Xi urged leaders at the summit to leverage their "mega-scale market", while Russian President Vladimir Putin showed support for Xi's ambition for a new global security and economic order that poses a challenge to the US.
"We should advocate for equal and orderly multipolarisation of the world, inclusive economic globalisation and promote the construction of a more just and equitable global governance system," he said.
"We must take advantage of the mega-scale market... to improve the level of trade and investment facilitation," said Mr Xi, urging the bloc to boost cooperation in fields including energy, infrastructure, science and technology, and artificial intelligence.
Mr Putin said the grouping has revived "genuine multilateralism" with national currencies increasingly used in mutual settlements.
"This, in turn, lays the political and socio-economic groundwork for the formation of a new system of stability and security in Eurasia," he said.
"This security system, unlike Euro-centric and Euro-Atlantic models, would genuinely consider the interests of a broad range of countries, be truly balanced, and would not allow one country to ensure its own security at the expense of others."
Putin says NATO enlargement has to be addressed for Ukraine peace
Speaking at the summit, Mr Putin said the West had tried to bring Ukraine into its orbit and then sought to entice the former Soviet republic into the US-led NATO military alliance.
"In order for a Ukrainian settlement to be sustainable and long-term, the root causes of the crisis, which I have just mentioned and which I have repeatedly mentioned before, must be eliminated," Mr Putin said.
"A fair balance in the security sphere" must be also restored, Mr Putin said, shorthand for a series of Russian demands about NATO and European security.
Reports in May suggested that Mr Putin's conditions for ending the war include a demand that Western leaders pledge in writing to stop enlarging NATO eastwards and lift a chunk of sanctions on Russia.
Mr Putin said that "understandings" he reached with US President Donald Trump at a summit in Alaska in August opened a way to peace in Ukraine, which he would discuss with leaders attending the regional summit in China.
"We highly appreciate the efforts and proposals from China and India aimed at facilitating the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis," Mr Putin told the forum.
"The understandings reached at the recent Russia–US meeting in Alaska, I hope, also contribute toward this goal."
Mr Putin also met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the summit, and praised Turkey's mediation attempts around the Ukraine war.
"I'm confident that Turkey's special role in these matters will continue to be in demand," the Russian president said during talks with Erdogan on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit.
Mr Putin added that the three rounds of direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul have made some progress on the humanitarian track.
Bilateral meeting between Xi, Modi
Mr Putin touched down in Tianjin yesterday with an entourage of senior politicians and business representatives.
Mr Xi held a flurry of back-to-back bilateral meetings with leaders including Mr Lukashenko - one of Mr Putin's staunch allies - and Mr Modi who is on his first visit to China since 2018.
Mr Modi told Mr Xi that India was committed to taking "forward our ties on the basis of mutual trust, dignity and sensitivity".
The two most populous nations are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.
A thaw began last October, when Mr Modi met with Mr Xi for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.
Their rapprochement deepened as US President Donald Trump pressured both Asian economic giants with trade tariffs.
'Mutual benefit'
China and Russia have sometimes promoted the SCO as an alternative to organisations like NATO. This year's summit is the first since Mr Trump returned to the White House.
Official posters promoting the SCO lined Tianjin's streets, displaying words such as "mutual benefit" and "equality" written in Chinese and Russian.
More than 20 leaders including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan are attending the bloc's largest meeting since its founding in 2001.
Mr Putin is expected to hold talks today with Mr Erdogan and Mr Pezeshkian about the Ukraine conflict and Iran's nuclear programme respectively.
Many of the assembled dignitaries will be in Beijing on Wednesday to witness the military parade, which will also be attended by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
