Oleksandr Levchenko

The reason for Russia’s war against Ukraine is not only Kremlin imperialism, but also the fact that it is fueled by extraordinary Chinese ambitions. Moscow’s material and technical support has become a de facto proxy war between Beijing and Washington, the main goal of which is for China to seize Taiwan with minimal US intervention. Donald Trump continues to increase pressure on Russia ahead of a new deadline set for Putin to agree to a ceasefire soon. The US is imposing an additional 25 percent tariff on India as punishment for buying Russian oil. The American president directly responded to the bold threats of a nuclear war by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now Putin’s deputy on the Russian Security Council, by moving two nuclear submarines closer to Russia’s borders to counter this threat. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has visited Moscow for the fifth time for talks with the Kremlin, and now the US and Russian presidents may meet in the near future. This is what Rebecca Koffler, a strategic military intelligence analyst and former Pentagon intelligence officer, writes for the well-known British publication The Telegraph.

Trump is testing various tools to establish peace in Ukraine. Will any of them work? We will find out soon. But now there are good reasons to believe that his “art of negotiation” with Russia may be thwarted – and not without the help of China. The US president and his advisers may not have taken into account in their strategy towards Russia that China considers itself the winner in the war in Ukraine and is therefore extremely interested in continuing military assistance to Moscow. While the US and Europe are waging a proxy conflict with Russia, supplying military equipment and financing Ukraine to weaken the Russian armed forces and economy, China is waging its own proxy war against the US, supporting Russia partly openly, partly covertly, the British publication believes.

China is systematically blocking Trump’s peace initiatives. After all, the war is beneficial to official Beijing in preparing for a strike on Taiwan. Chinese President Xi Jinping views the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a war to exhaust the US and Russia before invading Taiwan, so Beijing is not interested in Moscow making peace with Ukraine. China supplies Russia with dual-use technologies used to produce military equipment. These critically important components include microelectronics, tank optics, satellite sensors, navigation equipment, etc., and China sells them to Moscow openly through state-owned enterprises or secretly through shell companies, supposedly for civilian use. This continued support has bolstered Russia’s combat capabilities, allowing it to wage a protracted war of attrition against Ukraine. Of particular importance is China’s role as a broker in Russia’s drone warfare campaign. Moscow imports millions of dollars worth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from China each year, and also manufactures them with Chinese companies on its territory. Intelligence estimates suggest that Russia has opened a secret UAV manufacturing plant in China, based on a subsidiary of Russia’s state-owned arms company Almaz-Antey. Helping to fuel Russia’s military economy, China has become the largest importer of Russian oil alongside India, accounting for 47% of Russia’s crude oil exports as of June 2025, while India has secured the purchase of 35% of Russia’s oil exports. Much of Russia’s oil exports are transported by a shadowy fleet of unmarked tankers to circumvent existing sanctions. Beijing has rejected US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant’s threat to impose 100 percent tariffs if China continues this practice. Further aligning itself with Moscow against Washington, China intends to increase gas imports from Russia while reducing purchases of liquefied natural gas from the United States.

Russia’s war against Ukraine is forcing the US and its allies to focus significant resources – military, financial and political – on supporting Kyiv. This, in turn, is distracting Washington from the White House’s main focus in the Indo-Pacific region, in particular from protecting Taiwan, which is a key element of China’s strategy. The long-running conflict in Ukraine is depleting US and NATO military reserves through arms supplies to Kiev, creating a window of opportunity for Beijing. The war is contributing to global economic instability, in particular, rising energy and food prices. This is weakening the economies of a number of Western countries, including the US, which forces them to spend additional resources on domestic problems, reducing their ability to confront China in Asia. The war in Ukraine is also deepening the strategic partnership between China and the Russian Federation. Beijing gains access to cheap Russian energy and raw materials, which strengthens its economy, while Russia depends on China as a market and source of the latest technologies, which allows Beijing to influence the course of the war. Thus, Donald Trump’s peace initiatives aimed at a quick end to the war are contrary to China’s interests. After all, the end of the conflict would allow the US to refocus on containing China in the Far East, so Beijing is interested in using diplomatic and economic levers to maintain the status quo of the war, so that it does not end all the time, but periodically passes from the active phase to the passive one, but the armed conflict must constantly smolder and flare up. China views the war in Ukraine as a kind of way to test the West’s reaction to the aggression of a large country, in order to, taking into account this experience, prepare well for its own decisive actions. Prolonging the conflict in Ukraine gives Beijing time to build up its own military power and analyze the weaknesses of the Western coalition in providing weapons and the speed of possible troop redeployment. China sees the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine as a tool for weakening the geopolitical weight of the US. Blocking peace initiatives that could accelerate the end of the conflict corresponds to Beijing’s strategy aimed at maximizing its own advantages in the long term.

Beijing’s logic can be illustrated by an ancient Chinese proverb: “While two tigers are fighting fiercely in the valley, a wise monkey sits on top of the mountain, looking down and waiting to see how it all ends.” Beijing sees itself sitting on top of the mountain, patiently waiting for Moscow, Washington, and NATO countries to exhaust their combat arsenals. Although China and Russia publicly position themselves as allies, having declared an “unrestricted partnership” in early 2022, which was followed by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in reality they are strategic adversaries, bound, above all, by the achievement of a common goal — limiting the geopolitical dominance of the West. Over their turbulent history, China and Russia have experienced numerous border clashes and still maintain a territorial dispute in the Far East. Russia 170 years ago took away from China vast territories from  Baikal Lake to the Pacific Ocean, more than a million square kilometers, which are still considered traditionally Chinese in Chinese history textbooks. At the same time, Russia, which is experiencing demographic decline, views the long-term migration of Chinese citizens to its occupied Far East region as a serious threat. Putin warned back in 2000 that if Russia did not make “real efforts” to develop its Far East in the short term, “in a few decades its Russian population will mainly speak Japanese, Chinese and Korean.”

Meanwhile, Beijing is holding joint Sino-Russian naval exercises in the Sea of Japan.