SINGAPORE — China received this week its first liquefied natural gas cargo from a sanctioned Russian project, ship-tracking data from Kpler and LSEG showed, days ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Putin is among more than 20 world leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in China’s northern port city of Tianjin on Sunday and Monday, where he is expected to meet Xi to revive trade between the countries.

The meeting is expected to mark another diplomatic coup for Russia, which has had sanctions imposed by the US and European Union for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, after Putin held talks with US President Donald Trump in Alaska earlier this month on a potential peace agreement.

The tanker Arctic Mulan LNG, carrying LNG from the Arctic LNG 2 project, which is targeted by the sanctions, berthed at China’s Beihai LNG terminal in the southern region of Guangxi on Thursday, data from Kpler and LSEG showed.

The cargo came from a storage facility in the Russian Far East that has only received cargoes from Novatek’s Arctic LNG 2 project.

The delivery marks the first time superchilled fuel from the project reached an end-user since it started up last year.

“China and Russia are testing the waters,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, in a post on LinkedIn.