RUSSIA-CHINA COOPERATION DEEPER, DARKER, DANGEROUS

China and Russia are cooperating in ways we truly don’t appreciate in the west. Yet I remain convinced that the driver behind this is ultimately, China getting its own way. Russia will wake up one day, finding itself little more than in the position Belarus finds itself with Russia. It will end up a second rate power struggling for its identity, effectively subsumed into the economic and technological tyranny China will ultimately place upon it. Yet that’s a way off and probably post-Putin era.

Domestically Russia has embraced the Chinese technology that empowers the state to take control if it wishes, of even the minutia of daily life. The abolition of WhatsApp messaging, the impossibility of using iMessage because of blocks, cutting off almost all access to western social media, has long been a Russian aim. The compulsory use of the new Max App, released by Russia’s VK (a tech company), is basically a re-engineered and Russified version of WeChat. WeChat in China is a government censored and monitored messaging app, but much more than that.

Russians must have the app installed on all new phones from September 15 and existing ones will find that all older services they accessed separately will force their migration to it. It is in essence their access point to Gosuslugi, the Russian Government service portal, from which everything from your driving license to your tax returns are managed. You won’t be able to do anything without it. The government, as in China, will have access to your entire messaging profile, and in effect censorship, because who in their right mind is going to say anything knowing it will be flagged and a visit from the police likely follow? China provided this because it’s just another way of extending control.

And Russia has been making life miserable for its citizens by cutting off their mobile internet. They believe this will hinder Ukrainian drone operations when attacks happen as they use the masts to ping their locations and even connect to numbers in Ukraine for final video on target. It is what happened during Operation Spiderweb, and it’s a shock to me that the Russians had not expected what they had been doing with earlier Shaheeds to be used against them. The trouble is it’s been extremely widespread – from the far east to the far west and Crimea. So much so that Russians can’t do their internet banking and have had to demand more cash – a problem that also straining the banks financial credibility even further.

In other fields we know that China is up to its neck in the drone war against Ukraine, providing electronics from circuit boards to chips and cameras, never mind the motors that drive the Shaheeds. Some of the Shaheeds are using 100% Chinese components. Yet where are the secondary sanctions from America? Europe at least is preparing them.

We know that for over two years China is producing the Russian army’s tires, motorbikes, even personnel carriers. They’re also turning out dozens of trucks every day because they’re a prime target for Ukraine’s drones. They supply encrypted radios because Russia can’t produce enough and we know they’re the primary source of most Russian military clothing.

For the most part they have remained on the ‘passive’ side of the supply chain, not supplying the weapons that kill, but making them possible, its a thin line in being responsible for the death of Ukrainians, yet its one Americans justify every day when it comes to gun ownership: it isn’t the gun that kills, its the person pulling the trigger. China may make the motors that propel Shaheeds to the killing zone, but it’s the Russians who sent it.

Of course they’ve also been aiding and abetting Russia by buying its oil cheaply and advantageously, but that’s just business in their eyes. Who in their right mind will turn down cheap energy? The side effect is, it maintains Russia in what China increasingly sees as a war Russia must not lose, but is also not so keen to see it win – although only to a point, which is now becoming outdated. It’s clear to China that a West bolstered by forcing Russia to the table, giving it no concessions and Ukraine coming out even semi-victorious – well that would be very bad for the cause of state authoritarianism and China’s own military-political goals.

Yet the military level cooperation happening in a far darker and long term pattern, is more sinister. China is new to having a navy for example – by hulls counted the worlds largest, although its principle fleet warships and submarines capable of ‘blue water’ operations, not just coastal is not the largest, it soon will be, its a fearsome force growing increasingly capable and with huge resources to make it happen, far beyond its nearest rival the United States, which when it comes to ship building for its navy lives in decades long past and still has no solution to its endemic and deep seated problems.

The Russians have produced and modified plans for Chinese naval aviation in its infancy, and China has run with that and developed its own. Russia for decades provided the plans and patterns for China’s earliest submarines in the 1950’s and has continued to do so until quite recently. That got China ‘in the game’, but the Chinese knew that just copying second rate Russian subs that even they’d stopped using was just not the way forward. The peer they want to fight is the US, so the only way its to match what they have, and that’s now the beacon they follow. Use the best of what Russia can teach them, steal or develop their own, and if need be copy it and make it better than what the Americans have.

We know they do this, we know they got hold of F-35 basic design plans, and they blatantly stole the plans to the C-17 Globemaster-III and built an almost exact duplicate. The same with the E-2 Hawkeye. After a Chinese naval exercise a few years ago the Americans were shocked to recover what they thought was one of their own Mk-48 torpedoes, because right the way down to the microchips inside, the Chinese were using an almost exact copy. You don’t aim to be second, when your opponent is in the lead, you first copy him then do better than him. That’s a typical Chinese way of doing things, especially in a dictatorship where being innovative is technically frowned upon despite being tolerated for the most part these days, as long as it doesn’t challenge the power of the Party.

In 2024 Russia sent a pair of fighter escorts to accompany a pair of brand new H-6N Chinese bombers. They still make them despite being based on the Tu-16 Badger first operated by Russia in 1954, and the H-6 was built in China from 1958 to present, first entering service in 1969. However the H-6N version is very different. It’s entirely a nuclear weapons carrier first deployed in 2019, based on the 106th Bomb Squadron. It has in-flight refueling for the first time, and more efficient engines. It can carry and launch long-range, air-launched ballistic missiles (ALBMs), including the CH-AS-X-13 missile, which has a reported range of around 3,000 km. This capability gives the bomber a powerful stand-off strike role.
The H-6N serves as a strategic platform within China’s nuclear triad, with a focus on credible deterrence and power projection, particularly in contested regions like the South China Sea and around U.S. bases in the Indo-Pacific.
It has a redesigned fuselage to accommodate the large ballistic missiles and carries a heavier and more diverse payload, including cruise missiles, precision-guided munitions, and electronic warfare pods.

The Americans were stymied as to why a pair of these bombers with Russian fighter escort, flew up the coast of Alaska in 2024, deliberately entering the Air Identification Zone to get the US to send fighters to see them on patrol. Its now regarded as being a warning to the US that China has a bomber with such capabilities, that can reach far further than perhaps they understood, and that its part of their nuclear triad that can reach far across the Pacific, threatening the US in Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Kwajalein, Australia, Okinawa and pretty much anywhere else in the Pacific.

A recent naval exercise that took place last month was another completely new departure, on several levels. Russia and China operated remarkably closely and unusually the US fleet played a far more direct observational role than it had.

Their interest was peaked by the way the exercise was conducted in the North Pacific and the Western Pacific between the first and second island chains. In the north Pacific, for the first time China rather oddly deployed a submarine rescue vessel. the Americans were interested to see what they would do and how they’d behave. This northern force was largely Russian with a small amber of Chinese ships, while the southern force over 2,500km away were mostly Chinese, apparently practicing assault landing escorts and operations, along with ‘blockade-like’ behavior, the type you would use if intercepting US forces from reaching Taiwan. None of this was a surprise.

Yet as the exercise concluded and the data was processed by US naval intelligence, the Submarine rescue ship in the north suddenly started to show it was far more than it appeared. The Russians were guarding it, it did carry out submarine rescue simulations. But it soon became clear that its signals and communications were in over drive talking to Chinese satellites – it was concluded that it was in fact running the southern operation from far away in the north. There can only be one reason that would happen. The Chinese have worked out that the US navy priority target list would have a sub rescue ship well down on the list of potential targets, and one escorted by Russian warships and a few of its own, put it out of harms way in the event of hot war.

It also suggests that in the event of Chinese military action against Taiwan the Russians will not be sitting in port – they’ll operate as a fix in place for the Japanese navy – unable to throw its full might at China with a Russian fleet to its north and all the risks that would entail – especially if they were guarding a Chinese command ship that would be a legitimate target.

Russia has long experience of dealing with the American navy, experience and knowledge they have willingly transferred to China, because Russia feels it can manage Europe by itself – but it still feels useful for now in aiding its friend in the Pacific. It’s a new departure, and a deeper more dangerous cooperation that complicates the naval balance in the Pacific. Typical of Putin, it shows Russia still has relevance in a theater it has little real connection with.

For now their cooperation is interesting and revealing. Just as China intends it to be, Because military exercises are all about showing readiness and preparedness, they’re also warnings that they know what they’re doing, and if the time comes, it would be better if the US just let them do what they want to do. Perhaps with the current incumbent of the White House they may actually get their way.

The Analyst

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