With Russia's economy so shaky, how is it able to engage in all this aggression?

This is how:

President Obama may say China can be America’s “partner,” as he did Monday in Beijing, but the Chinese calculate their interests differently. The real partnership is between the Dragon and the Bear.

On Sunday in Beijing, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom signed a contract to sell gas from western Siberia to China’s own state energy giant, China National Petroleum Corp.

The Gazprom-CNPC deal is not the only major recent Russia-China energy deal. Last October, state-owned Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil producer, gave CNPC an equity stake in an oil field in eastern Siberia. This May, Gazprom and CNPC inked a 30-year, $400 billion gas pact, another landmark arrangement in what AFP has described as a rapidly expanding “energy alliance.”

And this week CNPC agreed to buy 10 percent of Vankorneft, a Rosneft subsidiary, which operates the lucrative Vankor oil field. As the Financial Timesnoted in September, the deal “represents a stunning change in strategy.” In the past, Russia brought in a foreign energy company only if it needed technology. For Vankor, Russia has all the expertise it requires, as the field is already in production. In short, it looks as if Russian President Vladimir Putin sold a stake to China because he needed cash quickly.

Filling the vacuum in a post-American world.