Chinese defense minister heading to Russia to discuss ‘practical cooperation’
Joel Gehrke
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China‘s defense minister, Li Shangfu, will travel to Russia next week as Moscow and Beijing seek to showcase their security ties despite Western appeals for the communist regime to curtail Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“New progress has been made in strategic communication, joint exercises and training, and pragmatic cooperation,” Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Tan Kefei said Friday. “These have continuously enriched the strategic connotations of the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era.”
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The pageantry of that partnership has provided an ominous backdrop for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. U.S. and European officials have worked over the last year to deter China from arming Russia for the war in Ukraine, but Russia and China have signaled their mutual frustration with the United States and its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific amid signs that the Russian military is increasingly dependent on supply chains that trace back to China.
“We’re picking [up] a lot of different stuff, China made,” Ukraine’s Vladyslav Vlasiuk, a sanctions policy adviser in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, told Reuters in an interview published Friday.
The Biden administration imposed sanctions on several Chinese entities last month on the grounds that the companies were providing Iran with components needed to manufacture the drones that Tehran has sent to Russia in recent months. Vlasiuk implied that a wider array of Russian weapons systems depend on Chinese technology.
“[In] the weapons recovered from the battlefield, we continue to find different electronics,” he said. “The trend is now that there is less Western-made components but more — not hard [to] guess which country — made components. Of course, China.”
The war in Ukraine has galvanized cooperation between the world’s leading trans-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific powers. Japan has joined the U.S., Canada, and the largest European economies, the so-called G-7, in developing sanctions to damage Russia’s economy and crimp the Russian defense industry’s supply chains. And whereas Japanese officials — along with counterparts from South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand — have become fixtures at NATO meetings, Russian and Chinese officials are hardening their own posture toward the U.S. and its allies in the Indo-Pacific.
“China stands strongly against NATO’s interference into Asia-Pacific affairs under the pretext of the so-called Chinese challenge and the establishment of an Asia-Pacific alternative to NATO,” the Chinese defense ministry spokesman said Friday.
Tan issued that statement just as Moscow announced surprise military drills for the Russian Pacific Fleet. A key part of the drills centers on the islands that both Russia and Japan have claimed since the end of the Second World War. Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a meeting with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin last month, reportedly unveiled a new policy of neutrality in that dispute, even though the communist regime historically has endorsed Japan’s claim.
“It is necessary to practice methods of operations for preventing the enemy deployment to the operationally important area of the Pacific Ocean — the southern part of the Sea of Okhotsk and repelling its disembarkation on the southern Kuril Islands and the Island of Sakhalin,” Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said Friday.
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Xi likewise has claimed to be neutral in the war in Ukraine, but they have frustrated Western officials by providing “diplomatic cover” for Russia.
“It is good that China has signaled its commitment to a solution, but I have to say frankly that I wonder why the Chinese position so far does not include a call on the aggressor Russia to stop the war,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Friday.