St. PETERSBURG, Russia — Russia has welcomed the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to develop part of its next-generation wireless technology, even as the United States is trying to convince allies that the company poses a prohibitive security risk.

Russia said Huawei would help build its new high-speed wireless network, known as 5G, in a deal signed on Thursday, the first day of a three-day visit by President Xi Jinping of China. The United States’ dispute over Huawei suggests that the world will be divided, with some countries accepting the Chinese maker’s equipment and others not. The 5G technology will usher in a major leap for all kinds of devices, especially those that are part of the so-called internet of things.

American authorities say that relying on Huawei equipment would open a window to possible Chinese surveillance of everyday life, with technical breaches possible. Despite a history of vigilance about foreign spying with multiple laws intended to protect data, the Kremlin highlighted the agreement between Huawei and MTS, one of the three largest cellphone operators in Russia.

The Kremlin noted that several business deals had been signed in a ceremony attended by President Vladimir V. Putin and Mr. Xi.

Huawei, the world’s largest supplier of networking equipment, denies it carries out espionage or could be ordered to do so by the Chinese government.

The company has become a point of contention in the broader trade dispute between the United States and China, with other countries under pressure to decide whether to allow the telecommunications giant to help build their next-generation networks. American authorities have pressed allies including Britain and Germany to ban Huawei and threatened to restrict intelligence-sharing with nations that let the company inside their networks.

On Thursday, Huawei’s vice president for cybersecurity and privacy, Mika Lauhde, told The Associated Press that the American sanctions on the company were largely collateral damage in the trade war. Huawei, he said, is “not the nucleus of the issue.”

The feud escalated Thursday when China’s Commerce Ministry said it planned to draw up its own list of “unreliable” foreign companies.

There was no indication of the value of the deal, which was officially a “memorandum of understanding.” Such deals are often not binding agreements.

Russia is also testing 5G equipment made by Western companies. Nokia, the Finnish company, signed a deal with the Russian cellphone company MegaFon last year, and on Thursday the Russian state telephone company, Rostelecom, agreed to build a testing area for high-speed wireless internet in Moscow using equipment from Ericsson, a Swedish supplier.

It’s not clear Russia will have a national 5G network, using Chinese or Western equipment, as the military has so far declined to free up the necessary radio frequencies.

“The situation there is a bit complicated,” a deputy prime minister, Maksim Akimov, said at a meeting with Mr. Putin in April. “We’d like to ask you for relevant orders,” to the military, so Russia can keep up with the new cellphone technology.

Since the onset of Western sanctions that began with the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Russia has tried to build economic ties with China, although Moscow and Beijing have their own history of tensions going back to border skirmishes in Siberia in 1969.

The Huawei deal came as Russia is courting Chinese investment at a business conference this week, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Russian media reported about 1,000 Chinese businessmen attended, while the United States ambassador, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., boycotted over the arrest this year of an American investor, Michael Calvey.

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