China Back Russia in the Ukraine War: The Facts

Observers say that at this time, Ukraine has the advantage on the battlefield. Beijing knows that. Allowing Russia to regroup is not in the interests of anyone but the Russians.

And the Chinese. In reality, Ukraine is a superpower proxy war, and China is backing Russia.

Russia and China know the stakes. Vladimir Putin is obviously all-in on Ukraine, and the Chinese are in full support. It’s apparent, for instance, that China greenlighted the invasion of Ukraine. Russia and China issued their 5,300-word joint statement after Putin met Xi in Beijing on February 4 of last year, just 20 days before Russia’s attack. That’s when they declared the “no-limits” partnership.

“No limits” is not much of an exaggeration. China, with elevated commodity purchases, effectively finances Russia’s war. Furthermore, Beijing has been offering financial services to Russia as America and partners cut Russian banks and institutions off. Beijing is putting diplomats in service of Moscow. Chinese central government and Communist Party media have been amplifying Russian war disinformation.

Moreover, China has been providing lethal assistance. In the opening moments of the war, there is data to suggest China fed location data, obtained from the Chinese-made drones that Ukraine had been operating, to Russia so that it could take out the drone operators.

More recently, there is also evidence to suggest China has been selling drones to Russia’s Wagner Group.

Indeed, Beijing has been supplying urgently needed items. In November, Defense Express, a Ukrainian site, reported that almost every day an An-124 cargo plane ferried military products from China’s Zhengzhou to Russia. The Russian planes turned off their transponders when they departed. The Washington Free Beacon in January reportedthat the flights carried, among other things, ammunition.

The Biden administration for the longest time refused to acknowledge China’s lethal assistance, saying only that Beijing was contemplating providing it. Now, Washington has had to make an admission. In the middle of this month, according to Kyodo News, the U.S. confirmed the presence of Chinese ammunition littering battlefields in Ukraine.

Now that it’s clear that China’s regime has crossed President Joe Biden’s “red line,” the Chinese leadership is probably worried about what happens next. That could also explain the timing of Xi’s excursion to Moscow.

In any event, Xi and Putin are clearly coordinating policies, dividing the international system into camps and in the process forming the core of a new axis. The war in Ukraine, therefore, looks like the first conflict of a divided world, what some are calling “Cold War 2.”

As Henry Kissinger declared last May to the Financial Times, “We are now living in a totally new era.”

In broad outline, this time resembles the late 1930s, when the West’s great democracies were in disarray.

China and Russia, on the other hand, are driving events. The Chinese foreign ministry characterizedthe Xi visit to Moscow as “a trip for friendship.” “It will,” the ministry said, “further deepen mutual trust and mutual understanding between China and Russia and cement the political foundation and public support for the long-standing friendship between the two peoples.”