China & Russia -- eternal friendship, permanent war

“Eternal friendship” was how China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi described relations with Russia last week after meeting President Vladimir Putin. What Putin wants is “permanent war”.

President Xi Jinping will see for himself when he goes to Moscow in early May to attend celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of victory in World War Two on May 9.

The celebrations are Kafkaesque. After signing a pact with Germany, the Soviet Union started World War Two in Europe by jointly invading Poland, without provocation. in September 1939. In June 1941, Hitler tore up the pact and, unprovoked, invaded the Soviet Union.

In February 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine without provocation, just as Hitler had invaded his country. His army is bombing civilian targets and killing thousands of civilians, just as the Nazis did.

According to figures from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Russia has so far suffered 900,000 casualties, including 250,000 killed, including 35,140 casualties alone in February this year.

President Donald Trump has tried in vain to negotiate a ceasefire between the two sides. But he has failed because Putin has added unacceptable pre-conditions – Ukraine cannot join NATO nor can foreign troops be stationed there, and Western military aid must cease.

Putin has put Russia’s economy on a war footing, with 40 per cent of total government spending this year on defence and national security, more than education, health care and social welfare combined.

On March 31, Putin signed a decree to mobilise an additional 160,000 soldiers between April and July, the highest number of conscripts since 2011. He aims to increase the total number of his military to 2.39 million, of whom active servicemen will number 1.5 million.

His economic policy is “permanent war”.

Xi will be the most important foreign guest at the May celebrations. None other of the wartime allies of the Soviet Union will be there because they regard Putin as a second Hitler.

To prepare for Xi’s visit, Wang Yi went to Moscow in early April. “The advancement of China-Russian ties will not halt but lead to broader horizons,” he said. “The friendship between the two countries has a long-term perspective and their co-operation allows no disturbance from outside.”

In 2024, bilateral trade reached a record US$224.8 billion, with Chinese firms successfully rushing to fill the void left by the departure of Western, Japanese and South Korean products.

In the first two months of this year, bilateral trade fell 7.1 per cent year-on-year to US$34.68 billion, with a sharp fall in exports of trucks and passenger cars.

Western officials say that China’s exports include semi-conductors, radars, sensors and machines that are dual-use and have been used by Russia’s military. But, unlike North Korea, China has not supplied men or weapons.

China is the world’s biggest manufacturer of drones and the components needed to make them. It sells them to both Russia and Ukraine. On the front line, drones are among the most important weapons, able to locate an enemy soldier and equipment and neutralise them.

The best drones have optic fibres because they cannot be detected by enemy electronic systems. China accounts for 80 per cent of fibre optic production in the world.

Russia’s objectives in the war were spelt out by Vladislav Sourkov, one of Putin’s advisers and the father of “Putinism”, the philosophy of his leader.

“Victory for Russia will be the military or military-diplomatic crushing of Ukraine and the separation of this artificial state into its natural fragments. Russia’s strategic objectives have not changed since February 24, 2022 (the start of the invasion),” he said in a rare interview with L’Express, a French magazine in late March.

“I have built an official ideology on the basis of the concept of the ‘Russian World’. It has no frontiers. This world exists everywhere where we find the Russian influence – cultural, military, economic, ideological or humanitarian. We will spread in all directions, as far as God wishes and we have the strength.”

Raphael Glucksman, a French member of the European Parliament, is a student of Sourkov. “In 2021, Sourkov published an article in which he wrote that the creation of chaos abroad was the only way for Russia to put an end to its internal disorder. This regime needs a conflict with us (the West) in order to exist.

“In the eyes of its leaders, the Russian empire is defined not by frontiers but by the outcome of force and wars,” he said. “To justify 25 years of oppression and suppression of liberty and militarisation of society, Putin needs an enemy more powerful than the Chechens or the Georgians – the West.”