Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Wednesday, with the two leaders hailing what Putin called an unprecedented level of relations.

Putin received a red-carpet welcome at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, where Xi described the China-Russian relationship as a stabilizing force in a turbulent world and warned against what he called a return to the “law of the jungle” in international affairs. Putin went so far as to say Russia-China relations were at an “unprecedentedly high level.”