China’s President Xi Jinping held his first face-to-face talks with a world leader in nearly two years on Friday, meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin who hailed “unprecedented” ties between the neighbours as tensions grow with the West. Xi has not left China since January 2020, when the country was grappling with its initial Covid-19 outbreak and locked down the central city of Wuhan where the virus was first detected. He is now embarking on a sudden flurry of diplomatic activity as more than 20 world leaders fly in for the Winter Olympics, an event China hopes will be a soft-power triumph