Under pressure from Kiev’s advances in the Ukrainian War and facing a crisis in the strategic Caucasus, Russia announced on Monday that it will increase its strategic partnership in the area of coma defense. China, with an increase in the number of military exercises and joint patrols.
The statement was made on Monday (19) by one of Vladimir Putin’s main allies, in the wake of the Russian president’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Uzbekistan, at the end of last week. .
Russia’s powerful Security Council secretary Nikolai Patruchev traveled to China after the leaders’ meeting in Central Asia. He met the Chinese Communist Party’s top Politburo diplomat, influential former Chancellor Yang Jiechi, in Nanping.
“Both sides agreed to further military cooperation, focusing on joint exercises and patrols, as well as strengthening contacts between their General Staffs,” Patruchev said. He and the Chinese said they were consolidating guidelines agreed between Xi and Putin last Thursday (15).
The meeting caught the attention of some observers because the Russian said he understood that China had concerns about the Ukraine War, launched by the Kremlin in February, prompting the reading that Putin had been publicly admonished by his main ally.
He was, in fact, the next day by another colleague, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who expressed his opposition to the conflict. Xi has never condemned the invasion, although he is obviously not interested in prolonging the conflict — China has its own economic problems and does not want to be seen as a sponsor of war by the West.
Patruchev and Yang discussed the Ukrainian crisis, the tension on the Korean peninsula (where they support the communist North) and also Taiwan — symbolically, the meeting took place in a city not far from the coast of the country closest to the island that Beijing wants to absorb as a province.
Twenty days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin and Xi had met in Beijing and declared a “boundless friendship”, sealing Russia’s entry on China’s side into Cold War 2.0 with the United States. However, this arrangement has some limits, not least because it is not a military alliance.
Since then, the Armed Forces of both sides have come even closer. China traditionally participates in military exercises with the Russians, but in the Vostok-2022 maneuver earlier this month, it first flew its fighter jets to operate over Russian soil.
In the most sensitive region for the Chinese, the Indo-Pacific, Moscow and Beijing have been increasing joint bomber patrols and naval maneuvers, in opposition to American protection of Taiwan and Washington’s policy of free navigation, which China considers a rehearsal. for possible blocking of their sea lanes in a conflict.
China, like India, is a major buyer of Russian weapons. Its Air Force depends on technology from Moscow, especially in the area of engines. With the war, US President Joe Biden warned Xi that he should not give military support to Putin, and he is not encouraged to do the same as the Russian did with Ukraine in Taiwan.
In practice, China has helped Russia evade punitive sanctions by increasing oil imports and announcing joint gas projects as the western market is being closed off to Putin.
Putin supports Xi’s claim on Taiwan. On Sunday (18), Biden said again that he would defend the island from a Chinese attack, sparking protests in the Chinese foreign ministry. In return, concerns were expressed, Xi never criticized the ally’s war.
In Ukraine, the timing is bad for Putin. After losing occupied areas in the Kharkiv region earlier this month, the president sees Kiev forces infiltrate the borders of Lugansk, the province he conquered in July.
It is still a timid advance, with a village retaken by the Ukrainians, but there are reports that the country’s military crossed the river used by the Russians as a natural border in the region. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed on Monday to stop until he had expelled the Russians.
Lugansk makes up, with Donetsk, the Russian-speaking region of Donbass (east of the country). Since 2014 in civil war, the region was already partially controlled by separatists supported by Moscow, and now it was rehearsing to hold a referendum to join Russia. The situation on the ground paralyzed the process.
To add complexity to the picture, Putin still sees a crisis unfolding on the Caucasus’ strategic border, with renewed tension between his ally Armenia and Turkey-backed Azerbaijan.
Here the Russian has US support: US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to Yerevan over the weekend to call for an end to what she called the Baku aggression, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on the Azerbaijani government the end of hostilities in the Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Ironically, Pelosi was called a provocateur by Putin when she made her controversial visit to Taiwan in August.
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