The Washington Post:China and Russia’s military relationship likely to deepen with Ukraine war

If war had broken out, Yu, now a political scientist at Wittenberg University, says he likely would have faced advanced Soviet battle tanks with little more than a machine gun.

© Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Chinese soldiers march toward Red Square during the military parade marking the 75th anniversary of the Nazi defeat in Moscow.His experience shows how far China-Russia military ties have come since that border dispute. “If you talk about the military-to-military relationship, it’s not just about arms sales or joint exercises, it’s very comprehensive and gradually developed,” he said.

Regardless of whether China becomes directly involved in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the conflict is shaping up to be an important milestone in the two countries’ military partnership, much like the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Just as Western sanctions that year gave the Russian military industrial complex new impetus to sell technology to the People’s Liberation Army, the Kremlin’s reliance on China after its Ukraine incursion could accelerate nascent joint technology development and operations.

After decades of China primarily buying arms from Russia, rapid advances in China’s domestic military industry have balanced out the relationship, with some Chinese technologies beginning to surpass Russian equivalents, at a time of growing political alignment between the two nations.

© STR/AFP via Getty Images Chinese paramilitary police border guards train in the snow at Mohe County in China’s northeast Heilongjiang province, on the border with Russia, on Dec. 12, 2016.The partnership stops short of a formal military alliance, which Chinese officials say is unnecessary for the two nuclear-armed states. Instead it allows each side to pick and choose when to engage in joint power-projection — most often to counter shared grievances with the United States — without forcing a stance on each other’s territorial disputes.

Nearly a month in, the war in Ukraine has tested the limits of Beijing’s support, as China ostensibly pursues a policy of neutrality even while refusing to criticize the Kremlin, blaming NATO for the crisis, and promoting Russian disinformation about U.S.-backed biological weapons programs in Ukraine.

According to U.S. officials, Russia made requests for Chinese military aid shortly after the assault began. Moscow and Beijing both deny the reports.

Military analysts say that China could theoretically aid Russia’s invasion substantially by providing everything from basic supplies and ammunition to weaponry such as drones or communications equipment, but is unlikely to send anything beyond basic provisions or potentially some dual-use items such as trucks.

To do so would be a diplomatically perilous step for Beijing and risk abandoning an often tricky effort to minimize involvement in a conflict that is increasingly targeting civilians. Advanced equipment would also be difficult to integrate into Russian forces quickly.

These joint constraints suggests that “supplies are mostly likely in the short-term — if Beijing makes the strategic decision to move even closer to Moscow,” said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Also in consideration is China’s relationship with Ukraine, supported in part by the latter’s willingness to provide critical military systems, and its long-standing stance of noninterference. As Yu of Wittenberg University put it: “When two friends are fighting, are you going to give one of them a knife?”

But if past precedent holds, the crisis may ultimately accelerate China-Russia military cooperation.

After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, China continued to build ties with the Kremlin, using Russia’s isolation to break through lingering mistrust and fears of intellectual property theft that had held back sales of sensitive military technology.

Before 2012, when Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, the China-Russia military-to-military relationship was in a lull, as bilateral arms sales declined due to Russian concerns over China reverse engineering its technologies as well as growing international competition from Chinese arms manufacturers.

But from 2013, Xi spearheaded a pivot to Russia, choosing the country for his first overseas trip, and forged a close personal relationship with Putin. For the Chinese military, already unable to buy U.S. arms due to an embargo imposed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, sanctions imposed on the Russian arms industry over Crimea were a way to secure better deals.

“From that moment, we have seen sales of top-notch, first-rate and state-of-the-art Russian arms technology to China,” said Sarah Kirchberger, a scholar at Kiel University. “Previously Russia was only willing to sell things that were older, at least one generation older, than what it would sell to other customers and what it would use itself.”

The shift was sealed with Chinese purchases of Su-35 fighter jets and the S-400 surface-to-air missile defense system. In recent years, the relationship has been further enhanced with joint naval drills in far-flung international waters and missile defense computer simulations that require a higher level of mutual trust and intelligence sharing.

© AP/AP In this photo taken from a video distributed by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, on Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2020, a Chinese H-6K strategic bomber flies during a joint patrol mission over the Western Pacific.A number of joint development projects has also been disclosed, mostly by Russia, including for heavy-lift helicopters, an early warning system for missile attacks and nonnuclear submarines.

Little information is publicly available about these initiatives — and some may never materialize — but taken together they suggest a shift in the relationship from China being purely a customer to being a partner. “Submarine technology is something you do not share with others very easily,” Kirchberger said. “That would really indicate a whole new level of cooperation, if it is actually true.”

While the threat of sanctions may mean China is constrained from providing overt military aid to Russia for Ukraine, over time an extended rupture with the West will make the Kremlin open to delivering even more advanced systems and allow more technology transfers, according to Paul Schwartz, an analyst at CNA, a research organization in Arlington, Va.

“At the same time, China will conceivably become an important supplier to Russia of underlying military technologies and components as well as systems where China holds a lead — sometimes a substantial lead — over Russia,” Schwartz said, listing drones, shipbuilding and maritime radar systems as areas where advanced Chinese technology could be of interest to Russia.

Space is another area where the two are working closely together on technologies and systems with potential military applications including on the integration of the two country’s GPS-equivalents, China’s Beidou network and Russia’s GLONASS.

Obstacles to an closer military relationship remain, however. Russia continues to be concerned about theft of its technology, international competition from Chinese arms manufacturers and even the possibility that a militarily strong China may not always treat Russia as an equal partner.

© GREG BAKER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images Russia’s President Vladimir Putin reviews a military honor guard with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a welcoming ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 8, 2018.China may be hesitant to take advantage of the Ukraine war to expand military ties. While Chinese officials say normal trade with Russia will continue, Beijing has adopted a wait-and-see approach to the conflict, in part to minimize its own exposure to sanctions and avoid unraveling already frayed relations with Western Europe and the United States.

But Xi’s long-term bet on Russia as a partner to challenging Western security blocs makes a rollback of military ties unlikely. Aside from arms trade and joint exercises, the two powers have increasingly coordinated opposition to security partnerships involving the United States and its allies.

China has lent support to Russian complaints about the expansion of NATO while Russia has condemned initiatives like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and AUKUS — both of which Beijing blames for stoking tensions in the Pacific.

On Sunday, for example, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng told a forum in Beijing that the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy was provoking trouble and causing a formation of blocs in the region that “is as dangerous as the NATO strategy of eastward expansion in Europe.”

© Savitskiy Vadim/AP In this photo released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe watch a joint military exercise by Russia and China held in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwestern China on Aug. 13, 2021.Pei Lin Wu contributed reporting from Taipei.

China and Russia’s military relationship likely to deepen with Ukraine war (msn.com)