Xi’s best course of action for China would be to ‘encourage’ Putin to pull out of Ukraine, which means he will double down, like a typical Party member who finds a ‘solution’ that makes the problem worse.
So the General SVR take for the past 3 months on this has been that Xi has been telling Putin to show battlefield success quickly or to make concessions to end the war and Putin said that he would only discuss the concessions in a personal meeting with Xi. So we’ll see what happens next week. Especially since Putin’s winter offensive failed.
And it’s 7 weeks until Putin’s Red Square “Victory Parade” on May 9th...