“The war in Ukraine has inadvertently proved that Beijing and Moscow’s rapprochement is not an alliance,” writes Senior Colonel Zhou Bo
IF THE ENEMY of my enemy is my friend, is the enemy of my friend also my enemy? Not necessarily. Or so China’s thinking goes when it comes to the raging Russian-Ukranian war. On the one hand China is Russia’s strategic partner. On the other, China is the largest trading partner of Ukraine. Beijing therefore tries painstakingly to strike a balance in its responses to the war between two of its friends.
Obviously, the conflict in Ukraine has done tremendous damage to Chinese interests, including its Belt and Road initiative in Europe. But Beijing sympathises with Moscow’s claim that the root cause of the conflict is NATO’s inexorable expansion eastward after the fall of the Soviet Union. All Russian leaders since Mikhail Gorbachev have warned of the consequences of such expansion. Russia feels that it cannot allow its Ukrainian brethren to leave—the Russian world—to join another camp.
A protracted war looks probable, if not inevitable. The situation bears similarities to the one in Afghanistan during Russia’s war there in the 1980s. An American-led alliance sent endless weapons to theThanks to the crisis, a brain-dead NATO has revived. In February Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, created a special €100bn fund for defence and announced that his country would spend 2% of its GDP on defence every year—a NATO guideline.
In recent months speculation abounded that Beijing and Moscow’s “unlimited” partnership—announced during Mr Putin’s visit to China in February for the Winter Olympics—might usher in a military alliance. But the war in Ukraine has inadvertently proved that Beijing and Moscow’s rapprochement is not an alliance. China didn’t provide military assistance to Russia.
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