I would agree with that.
I think that things are happening not in the way that Xi Jinping would have hope they would happen. It was probably not only on his mind but on the minds of many people, including people in this room, that when the invasion happened on February 24, 2022, it would probably take only a few weeks or a few months for Putin to take up a chunk of the territory in Ukraine, and then that would be it. Fortunately, it didn't happen that way.
Now they have come to the juncture where they have to huddle even closer with each other, because they are already seen as one.