For the past four years, only one global superpower has had the capacity and influence to stop the war in Ukraine: China. Yet it has chosen not to – why?
Through a combination of proactive sanctions avoidance, direct military support, and help to keep the Russian economy alive, Beijing has enabled Putin’s war machine to continue long after it should have been exhausted.[1] Russia might be the junior partner in material terms, but the West needs to understand: Beijing needs Moscow even more than Moscow needs Beijing.
Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron made a direct appeal to Beijing, urging it to exert pressure on the Kremlin to agree to a ceasefire with Ukraine.[2] German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul made similar efforts, and the same messages have been communicated from the highest levels of EU leadership.[3] Ursula von der Leyen and EU Council President Antonio Costa travelled to meet with President Xi Jinping in June, specifically to seek Chinese leverage to pressure Russia to end the war.[4] However, the deeper insight from all of these European efforts is continued miscalculation.
When the continent’s leaders appeal to President Xi Jinping to “pressure Putin” toward a ceasefire, they fundamentally misunderstand Beijing’s incentives. They assume China shares an interest in restoring regional stability. It does not. Beijing’s interest lies in Western distraction and fracture, and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine is the perfect tool for this.
China does not support Russia because Moscow is powerful or ideologically aligned – but because it is strategically useful. The asymmetry of the partnership benefits China: it enables Beijing to externalise the costs of confrontation with the West while advancing its geopolitical aims without engaging in direct conflict. What Western leaders fail to understand is that this relationship will continue to deepen and harden. Not despite Ukraine, but because of it – and for three strategic reasons:
1. Russia is Beijing’s Strategic Lever: It Forces the West to Choose
China’s most sophisticated gain from Russia’s war on Ukraine is that it forces the West to make difficult strategic choices. By enabling Russian aggression across multiple theatres – from Europe to the Arctic and the Indo-Pacific – Beijing has weaponised the Kremlin’s instability. This diverts Western focus, fractures strategic coherence, and drains resources from the Indo-Pacific competition, which remains China’s principal concern. The Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, underscored this point explicitly with his European counterpart, Kaja Kallas.[5] He warned that China could not accept Russia losing the war, arguing that such an outcome would allow the United States and the West to shift their full attention toward China and the wider Indo-Pacific.
The mechanism is straightforward: Russia creates crises faster than the West can address them simultaneously. European capitals are forced to commit defence budgets to the eastern flank; the US Navy divides its attention between NATO’s northern exposure and its forward deployment in the Indo-Pacific. NATO members debate Arctic strategy while China consolidates regional dominance.[6] Each Russian escalation in Ukraine compounds these trade-offs, forcing alliance members to divide attention and resources between simultaneous threats, rather than focusing efforts in a single direction.
Recent US actions in Venezuela underscore that US power remains decisive but increasingly prioritised by theatre and proximity, reinforcing Beijing’s incentive to sustain the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine as a means of complicating and delaying a complete US strategic concentration on the Indo-Pacific region.
This is where Beijing’s force multiplier advantage becomes decisive. Recent joint-bomber patrols near Japan – involving Russian nuclear-capable Tu-95 strategic bombers operating alongside Chinese H-6 bombers – demonstrate the operational principle.[7] China signals regional resolve and stretches Japanese air-defence responses without incurring the full political cost of independent action. Russia absorbs the diplomatic friction; China gains the strategic benefits.
Critically, this approach works because Russia and China operate on different timescales and objectives. Russia seeks immediate battlefield gains in Ukraine. China, by contrast, is playing the longer game of regional dominance. Russia’s urgency becomes China’s strategic cover.
2. Ukraine is Beijing’s Spanish Civil War: The Taipei Testing Ground
Just as the 1930s War in the Iberian Peninsula was a live test-bed for the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, China is now using Russia and Ukraine as its own military and strategic test-bed. The objective is not to conquer Kyiv, but to understand Chinese efforts to take Taipei as we enter the critical “Davidson Window.”[8]
Beijing has treated the war in Ukraine as a case study for analysing Russian successes and failures across logistics, air defence, reconnaissance-strike integration, and electronic warfare. It has already translated these lessons into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) doctrine, training, and force development.[9] The PLA increasingly reflects observations drawn from Russia’s adaptations and failures.[10] This is most noticeable in integrated air defence, logistics, and information dominance, accelerating joint operations readiness for high-intensity conflict scenarios, including a potential Taiwan contingency.
The Kremlin’s experience under sanctions, such as rewiring its economy, rerouting trade flows, and operating under long-term export controls, allows Beijing to test its own economic resilience and evaluate which sanction mechanisms are effective and how to circumvent them.[11] Crucially, this learning comes at minimal cost to Beijing, as Russia absorbs the political, economic, and military risks of experimentation while China refines its own preparedness for an anticipated potential Taiwan escalation in the years ahead.
3. Russia is Beijing’s Legitimacy: It Accelerates an Alternative Global Order
While the West exhausts itself debating the future of Ukraine, Beijing exploits Russia’s isolation to accelerate construction of an alternative global economic and political architecture centred not in Washington, but in Beijing. Russia’s sanctions experience and forced pivot toward non-Western partners does not weaken this alternative order – it legitimises and accelerates it.
Beijing has weaponised Russia’s ostracism to demonstrate that the Western financial system is no longer essential for major powers to thrive. As Russia pivots toward CIPS – the Chinese Cross-Border Payment System – rather than SWIFT, toward bilateral trade settlement rather than dollar-denominated transactions, it becomes a living laboratory proving that economic decoupling from the West is survivable.[12] When Russia joins Chinese-led technology standards initiatives – such as 5G, semiconductors, and AI – while the West maintains separate ecosystems, it proves that both can function independently and in parallel.[13]
China does not need to force this transition; Russia’s desperation does the work for Beijing. Every successful Russian workaround to sanctions further affirms the viability of Beijing’s own alternative infrastructure. More broadly, Russia’s defiance has accelerated the expansion of the BRICS forum and other solidarity mechanisms that marginalise Western leverage.[14] The BRICS+ bloc now encompasses over 30% of global GDP and is growing. Russia’s willingness to absorb Western punishment while Beijing remains unblemished positions China as the rational, rising power within this alternative consensus – the partner that benefits from Western overreach without bearing its costs. Russia becomes the test case proving that confronting the West-led order is possible.
Looking Ahead
The China-Russia partnership succeeds not because it resembles a traditional alliance, but because it resembles a relationship where the latter does not yet realise it is infected. Moscow absorbs costs across every dimension – military escalation, sanctions pressure, political isolation, diplomatic friction – while Beijing extracts strategic value with minimal risk or exposure. This is not a partnership. It is calculated exploitation disguised as alignment.
Every month that the Kremlin keeps the West locked into European crisis management is a month China gains in the Indo-Pacific with minimal Western involvement. Russia’s willingness to absorb military, diplomatic, and sanctions-related risks enables Beijing to apply cumulative pressure across multiple regions without direct confrontation, stretching US and allied planning capacity while China consolidates military readiness and improves its strategic positioning.
Every NATO defence dollar committed to the eastern flank is a dollar unavailable for contingency planning for Taiwan. Every Western political argument about burden-sharing and allied commitment is an opening for Beijing to consolidate regional dominance without direct confrontation. NATO has spent four years strengthening European deterrence while inadvertently weakening its position in the theatre that will define the 21st century.
The real question is not why Beijing supports Moscow: it is whether the West will recognise a trade-off it has unknowingly accepted before it becomes irreversible.
The architecture of this asymmetry is likely permanent. As long as Ukraine drags on, Beijing wins. As long as the West divides its attention, China advances. Western leaders who continue to appeal for Chinese restraint are asking Beijing to abandon its most significant strategic advantage at precisely the moment it matters most. As soon as the West recognises this reality, Beijing will accelerate its Taiwan timeline, in order to act before Western unity and coordination can emerge to confront them.
William Dixon is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Service Institute, specialising in cyber and international security issues.
Maksym Beznosiuk is a strategy and security analyst & writer whose work focuses on Russia, Ukraine, and international security.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the individual authors and do not reflect the views of The Foreign Policy Centre.
[1] RFE/RL’s Russian Service, EU Finds China Responsible For 80 Percent of Russia Sanctions Avoidance, Says German Report, May 2025, https://www.rferl.org/a/german-report-eu-china-russia-sanctions-avoidance-80-percent/33425633.htm; Seth G. Jones, China And Russia Bolster Their ‘No Limits’ Alliance, WSJ Opinion, December 2025, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/china-and-russia-bolster-their-no-limits-alliance-c6bc6e49; Keith Bradsher, How a Chinese border town keeps Russia’s economy afloat, The Japan Times, July 2025, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/07/25/world/politics/chinese-border-town-russia-economy/; Huileng Tan, Russia’s wartime lifeline from China comes with a price: an ‘embarrassing reversal’ for Moscow, Business Insider, December 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-economy-china-reliance-oil-exports-embarrassing-reversal-2025-12
[2] Le Monde with AFP, Macron calls on China to help end war in Ukraine, rebalance trade, Le Monde, December 2025, https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/12/04/macron-tells-xi-that-france-and-china-must-overcome-their-differences_6748135_4.html
[3] Ministry of Foreign Affairs China, Wang Yi holds talks with German Foreign Minister Waldfol, December 2025, https://www.mfa.gov.cn/wjbzhd/202512/t20251208_11768951.shtml
[4] Zoya Sheftalovich, EU warns China to push Putin to end war as relations hit ‘inflection point’, Politico, July 2025, https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-warns-china-push-vladimir-putin-russia-end-ukraine-war-relations-hit-inflection-point-summit/
[5] Reuters, Exclusive: Chinese engines, shipped as ‘cooling units’, power Rssian drones used in Ukraine, July 2025, https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/chinese-engines-shipped-cooling-units-power-russian-drones-used-ukraine-2025-07-23/
[6] Patrik Andersson, China and Russia challenge the Arctic order: But understanding how means looking beyond their partnership, DIIS Policy Brief, July 2025, https://www.diis.dk/en/research/china-and-russia-challenge-the-arctic-order
[7] Reuters, Russian bombers join Chinese air patrol near Japan as Tokyo-Beijing tensions simmer, CNN World, December 2025, https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/09/asia/south-korea-japan-china-russia-warplanes-intl-hnk-ml
[8] Davidson Window signals the period during which senior US defence officials have warned China might attempt military action against Taiwan.
[9] Colin Christopher, China Accelerates Modernization by Applying Lessons From Russia-Ukraine War, TRADOC Intelligence Post, September 2025, https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/product/china-accelerates-modernization-by-applying-lessons-from-russia-ukraine-war/
[10] Howard Wang and Brett Zakheim, China’s Lessons From the Russia-Ukraine War: Perceived New Strategic Opportunities and an Emerging Model of Hybrid Warfare, RAND, May 2025, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA3100/RRA3141-4/RAND_RRA3141-4.pdf
[11] Georgi Kantchev and Lingling Wei, China Is Studying Russia’s Sanctions Evasion to Prepare for Taiwan Conflict, The Wall Street Journal, December 2024, https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-is-studying-russias-sanctions-evasion-to-prepare-for-taiwan-conflict-5665f508
[12] Natalia Chabarovskaya, Going Steady: China and Russia’s Economic Ties are Deeper than Washington Thinks, CEPA, June 2025, https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/going-steady-china-and-russias-economic-ties-are-deeper-than-washington-thinks/; Gleb Bryanski, Darya Korsunskaya, Elena Fabrichnaya and Gleb Stolyarov, Russia eyes China trade revival as Putin prepares for Xi summit, sources say, Reuters, August 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/china/russia-eyes-china-trade-revival-putin-prepares-xi-summit-sources-say-2025-08-28/
[13] Daniel Balazs, IP25091 | China-Russia Dual-Use Technology Cooperation: Geopolitical Bifurcation in the Age of Emerging Technologies, September 2025, RSiS, https://rsis.edu.sg/rsis-publication/idss/ip25091-china-russia-dual-use-technology-cooperation-geopolitical-bifurcation-in-the-age-of-emerging-technologies/
[14] BRICS is an acronym for a bloc of emerging economies including: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. With a further expansion in 2024 to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, it is sometimes referred to as BRICS+. Stewart Patrick et al., BRICS Expansion and the future of World Order: Perspectives from Member States, Partners, and Aspirants, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2025, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/03/brics-expansion-and-the-future-of-world-order-perspectives-from-member-states-partners-and-aspirants?lang=en
