China wants prolonged war in Ukraine

Mark O'Neill November 18, 2025 12:51

China wants neither Russia nor Ukraine to have a decisive victory in their nearly four-year war and would prefer that the war is prolonged.

That is the judgement of Pierre Andrieu, a former French ambassador to Russia. Tajikistan and Moldova. Now he teaches international relations at French universities and abroad as an external professor. He is the author of Géopolitique des Relations Russo-Chinoises (“The Geopolitics of Russo-Chinese Relations”).

“During a recent visit to Europe, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told a senior official of the European Union: ‘Beijing does not wish to see Russia lose in Ukraine because it fears that United States will concentrate all its attention on China,’” he said.

“Beijing continues to support the war of Moscow and considers Russia as an indispensable strategic partner. China has no interest in seeing Russia suffer a total defeat or achieve a decisive victory in Ukraine,” he said."From this point of view, the prolongation of the war serves China's strategic interests."

Russia could not continue its war without the munitions supplied by North Korea – plus 10,000 soldiers – and the dual-use semi-conductors, machines, electronics and other parts and components supplied by China.

Since the start of the invasion in February 2022, Sino-Russian relations have deepened. In 2024, bilateral trade reached US$245 billion, more than double the figure in 2020. China has replaced Western Europe, Japan and South Korea as the main supplier of cars, machines and a wide range of industrial and consumer goods.

On February 4, 2022, two weeks before the invasion, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signed a declaration declaring a “friendship without limits”. But, in reality, it is not without limits.

Andrieu said that, for China, trade with Russia was far behind that with the U.S., US$582.9 billion in 2024, and that with the European Union, US$739 billion in 2023.

“If China is the first trading partner of Russia, Moscow only accounts for a negligible part of the Chinese market, with 70 per cent of its exports raw materials and energy products.

Russia is eager to export more oil and gas to China, through a pipeline called Power of Siberia 2. But China is reticent. “It wants to diversify as much as possible its imports, limiting Russian supplies at a maximum of 30 per cent of its needs of gas and 20 per cent of its needs of petrol. Its investments in renewable energy reduce further its dependence on imported fossil fuels,” Andrieu said.

“The gap between the two economies is enormous. In the 2025, the nominal GDP of Russia will be US$2.135 trillion, while that of China will reach US$21.643 trillion. In 2020, the GDP per capita of China surpassed the GDP per capita of Russia.”

Many Russians are uneasy about this imbalance. A recent survey of the public by the Levada Centre in Russia found three major fears – Beijing would annex its territory, Russia’s growing economic dependence and a military conflict.

The Centre’s report said that there was a risk of Russia becoming totally dependent on China and becoming its vassal. Beijing would be able to set its own conditions and close the door at any moment, as the United States and Europe have done, it said.

Andrieu said: “in 2022, major Chinese investments in Russia stopped, because Chinese firms feared secondary sanctions from the United States. According to Russian bankers, by the summer of 2024, 98 per cent of Chinese banks had ceased to accept direct payments from Russian companies. They are forced to go through third parties, which involve additional costs and delays.”

Under three “unequal” treaties in the 19th century, Tsarist Russia annexed nearly two million square kilometres of Chinese territory, including the Far East port of Vladivostok. Vladimir Lenin promised to give the land back to China, but Josef Stalin reneged on this promise. The border issue was resolved by two treaties in October 2003 and July 2008.

“Nonetheless, the memories of these annexations remain alive in the collective memory of Chinese. Beijing regularly publishes maps which represent these regions as part of land historically Chinese,” said Andrieu.

Relations between Stalin and Mao Zedong were bad. On a visit to Moscow in December 1949, his first trip outside China, Mao was kept waiting for a week in a state guest house where he watched Soviet propaganda films. This was to underline that Stalin was the leader of the Communist world and Mao a junior partner.

“Stalin considered Mao a ‘margarine Communist’, unreliable. Mao despised Nikita Khruschev and Leonid Brezhnev. He considered the Soviet Union ‘revisionist; and ‘social-imperialist’ and demanded the return of the lost territories. For its part, the Soviet Union considered China, especially during the Cultural Revolution, as ‘deviationist and leftist’.”

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.