The much shorter (less than ) western border section is between Russia's Altai Republic and China's Xinjiang. It runs in the mostly snow-covered high elevation area of the Altai Mountains. Its western end point is the China-Kazakhstan-Russia tripoint, whose location is defined by the trilateral agreement as , elevation, 3327 m. Its eastern end is the western China-Mongolia-Russia tripoint, at the top of the peak Tavan Bogd Uul (Mt Kuitun), at the coordinates .