During a four-hour meeting in Brussels in July 2025, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly told the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, that China could not afford a Russian defeat in Ukraine.
This was a simple power calculus: if Russia lost, the United States would be free to shift its full attention to Beijing. The remark came more than three years into the Sino-Russian “no-limits partnership” that Presidents Xi and Putin declared on the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The exchange, first reported by the South China Morning Post and omitted from the Chinese government’s official account of the meeting, showed how Beijing actually views the war. China has long presented itself as a neutral party interested in peace. In private, however, its foreign minister in effect acknowledged that Russia’s survival as a fighting power serves its global interests.
Beijing’s siding with Moscow goes beyond rhetoric, and it goes beyond simply buying a great deal of Russian energy. China has largely replaced Europe as the principal market for Russian hydrocarbons. Before 2022, Russia’s energy infrastructure and commercial relationships were heavily oriented toward Europe. Western sanctions and Europe’s diversification forced Moscow to redirect enormous volumes eastward, and China absorbed much of it, often at a discount on Russian crude.
Since February 2022, mineral fuels have accounted, on average, for about 70% of the value of China’s imports from Russia. The result is a complementary trade: Russia sells commodities, above all energy, and China sells manufactured goods.
That trade is now indispensable to Russia’s ability to keep fighting. China is not Russia’s only major customer – India too has been crucial to Russian crude exports, but China’s purchases are broader, encompassing oil, pipeline gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and coal. China also supplies the technology and components Russia needs to modernize its weapons platforms and build them at scale; the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission reports $10.3bn in controlled dual-use exports to Russia since 2022, and $372bn in Chinese purchases of Russian fossil fuels since the invasion.
The economic balance has tilted heavily toward Beijing since Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion: China buys the oil and gas that once flowed westward, supplies machinery and components Moscow struggles to obtain elsewhere, and provides political cover as Russia’s relations with Europe have all but collapsed. Beijing has also shown that it knows how to use that advantage.
Both governments approved the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline in principle in September 2025, but the project has since stalled over prices, with China reportedly holding out near Russia’s subsidized domestic rate against a Russian ask several times higher. Moscow has few alternatives. Beijing has Central Asian pipelines, Gulf and Australian LNG, and rising domestic production.
Beijing’s leverage over energy does not extend to every aspect of the partnership. Its overall manufacturing base exceeds Russia’s by orders of magnitude, yet Russia still leads in several military technologies where China is only beginning to build its own expertise.
Over the past three decades, Moscow has made significant advances in nuclear attack submarine propulsion, hypersonics, and, of late, in unmanned aerial system (UAV) design, all of them technologies China needs to become a near-peer competitor to the United States.
That gives Russia real bargaining power in Beijing, and it poses a clear threat to the West should Moscow decide to infuse Chinese systems with its most advanced technology and shorten China’s development cycles.
Military cooperation between the two has deepened since 2022. Their forces now conduct regular exercises and patrols, including anti-submarine and air-defense drills in the Sea of Japan, and the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission counted at least 119 combined exercises as of April. Its August primer on the relationship also cited reports of cooperation on a missile defense system that would surpass Russia’s S-500 and on China’s next-generation Type 096 ballistic missile submarine. Public information does not establish what Russia has actually transferred, but Putin’s continued reliance on Xi has given Beijing an opening to press for technologies Moscow once guarded closely. Evidence suggests this may already be underway.
Today, Russia is the weaker of the two powers, but weak powers can still hold valuable assets, and Russia’s most obvious strength, after its military technology, is its ability to keep the United States engaged in Europe. So long as the Ukraine war continues, Beijing benefits from the competing demands on US military planning and defense industrial capacity in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters.
The status quo in Ukraine therefore suits Beijing better than either ending would. A Russian collapse is the outcome China cannot accept, but an outright Russian victory would bring problems of its own, since it would relieve Moscow of the imperative to collaborate and level the bilateral relationship.
The war has also let Russia build a much closer military relationship with North Korea. Pyongyang supplied munitions and then personnel for Putin’s campaign, while Russia offered political protection and, according to South Korea’s defense minister, likely technical assistance for North Korea’s submarine program.
Moscow’s dealings with Iran have followed a similar pattern: Tehran supplied drones, and in September the Financial Times reported that Russian specialists had helped Iran develop supersonic cruise missile technology that could be used to hit US aircraft carriers and other targets. As these ties deepen, Moscow acquires clients in two theaters where Beijing has long been the senior outside patron.
Russia can now exert pressure not only across Europe but in the Middle East and on the Korean Peninsula. Russia’s ability to draw American resources into several theaters strengthens Putin’s hand with Xi. Moscow is not acting at Beijing’s direction, nor does it need to; their interests overlap even where their policies differ.
No war lasts forever, so the real question is whether the partnership survives the peace. It has often been treated as opportunistic, an arrangement that will eventually buckle under the weight of historical grievance and the widening gap in national power once the immediate imperative to cooperate is gone.
That reading now looks too comfortable. Russia’s move to a wartime economy has created constituencies with a stake in confrontation, and “Eurasianist” ideology has gained enough traction in Moscow to frame relations with the West as structurally adversarial rather than temporarily strained.
Both Russia and China want the international order built by the United States and its allies dismantled. That is why Western attempts to pry the two apart through some version of a “reverse Kissinger” are unlikely to work: the original opening to China exploited a Sino-Soviet split that already existed, and there is no comparable split today.
Russia may be the junior partner, but junior does not mean expendable, and Beijing shows no sign of treating it that way.
Chels Michta is a Non-resident Fellow with the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Chels is a former CEPA Title VIII Fellow and is currently a military intelligence officer serving in the US Army.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Army, the US Department of War, or the US government.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
