And a comment on that article ...
let's not forget that Russia is a small market. It might have an enormous land mass (the largest country in the world, covering over 17,125,192 km2, and encompassing more than one-eighth of Earth's inhabited land area, according to Wikipedia), it has only 145 million inhabitants.
Its economy is slightly larger than that of Spain but the Russian people are 70% poorer than the Spanish people. There is only one EU country with a poorer population than Russia and that is Bulgaria. Moreover, these economic figures are from before some of the harshest economic sanctions the world has ever seen. The Russian economy never really recovered from the sanctions post the annexation of Crimea and those were peanuts compared with the current sanctions. The ruble currency is being propped up artificially but they can't keep that up for much longer and every time the capital controls are eased slightly we see signs of capital flight. Russia is suffering a big brain drain at the moment as educated people are leaving the country to Turkey, Armenia and Georgia.
Regardless of how much the Chinese government wants to maintain a relationship with Russia on a political level, as a Chinese company it is playing with fire to keep doing business with such a small, and submerging, market if the risk is losing custom in the richest parts of the world, Europe and North America.