NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg days earlier urged Beijing to cease its support for Russia.
Chinese and Russian naval and air forces will conduct another round of joint exercises this month, according to China’s defense ministry, strengthening the partnership between the two neighbors that some analysts say is based on their shared adversary, the United States.
The joint operation will take place in the air and water surrounding the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk, the ministry said in an online
statement on Sept. 9, without providing further details.
The operation, which will be carried out according to an annual plan, aims to deepen “the level of strategic coordination” between the Chinese and Russian militaries and “enhance their ability to jointly respond to security threats,” the ministry added.
Military cooperation between the two neighbors has intensified over the past few years. In July, the two countries
conducted live-fire exercises in the South China Sea.
The Chinese defense ministry announced on Sept. 9 that Beijing would conduct its fifth maritime cruise with the Russian naval forces in the Pacific and take part in the Russian military’s “Ocean-2024” drill, without giving any details.
Days before the announcement, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg urged China to cease supporting Russia.
“China has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said at a briefing on
Sept. 6 in Oslo. “China is the one that enables production of many of the weapons that Russia uses.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has
rejected the criticism of being an “enabler” and has been keen to position itself as a neutral player throughout the war, which started
on Feb. 24, 2022. However, just weeks before the war began, CCP leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting in Beijing amid the start of the Winter Olympics and declared a “no-limits“ partnership between their countries.
Although the CCP
vowed not to send weapons to Russia, the United States and its NATO allies have said that Beijing is sending machine tools, chips, and other materials with both civilian and military uses to help rebuild Moscow’s defense sector.
China has also bolstered Russia’s economy by
buying oil and other goods. According to China’s customs data, bilateral trade between the two countries reached an all-time high of $240.1 billion last year, a
25 percent increase from the previous year.
On Sept. 9, China’s foreign ministry announced that its top diplomat, Wang Yi, will visit Russia’s St. Petersburg this week to attend a BRICS security meeting.
China’s support for Russia has become a contentious issue in its relationships with the
United States and the
European Union, its main trading partners. Despite this, analysts
doubt that the CCP will stop assisting Russia, as it stands to benefit from the war.
One of Beijing’s biggest gains is the shift in the United States’ focus and resources away from the Asia-Pacific region, according to Eugene Rumer, a former U.S. intelligence officer and director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Carnegie, a Washington-based think tank.
“The United States has had to divert military resources, political capital, and the time of its senior policymakers, while the unexpected demand from Europe on U.S. resources has triggered domestic political divisions,” Rumer wrote in a
study published with Carnegie on Sept. 3. “Instead of focusing on China as the ‘pacing threat,’ U.S. policymakers now have to deal with future, possibly simultaneous, contingencies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific.”
According to Rumer, the closed partnership between China and Russia rests on a “solid foundation.”
“Two factors—shared authoritarian domestic politics and adversarial relations with the United States—are most important,” Rumer said.
