By Sari Arho Havren
In January this year, China’s Ambassador to the United Nations offered what he plainly considered a decisive rebuttal of Western criticism: had China really been helping Russia, he argued, Russia would already have won the war. A few months earlier, China’s top diplomat Wang Yi had told the EU’s High Representative something rather different – that China cannot afford to see Russia lose, because Washington would then turn its full strategic attention to China and the Indo-Pacific.
These statements cannot both be true. But both are revealing, and between the flat denial and the candid admission lies a problem in how the West has come to understand this relationship. For more than four years, we have treated China’s support for Russia as a customs problem. Each new disclosure- a spike in fibre-optic cable shipments, a surge in machine-tool exports, satellite imagery shared with Russian forces, and most recently the covert training of Russian servicemen at Chinese military facilities- arrives as a discrete story, generates a news cycle, and is filed away. We audit the variables one at a time. What we rarely do is assess what they add up to.
My report for the Henry Jackson Society, Calibrated Collusion – China, Russia and the War in Ukraine, argues that the sum is far greater than the parts. Taken individually, each stream of support can be minimised or explained away. Taken together, they describe a single, deliberate policy authorised at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party: China has become the indispensable enabler of Russia’s war effort, economically, technologically, and diplomatically, whilst calibrating every element of that support to remain below the threshold that would trigger the full weight of Western retaliation.
The evidence is not obscure. Over one-third of Russia’s entire oil export volume now flows to China, and some Western analysts estimate that Chinese energy purchases effectively bankroll up to sixty per cent of the Kremlin’s war budget. In addition, Beijing accounts for roughly three-quarters of Russia’s imports of high-priority battlefield goods. Nearly all bilateral trade is settled in yuan and roubles, increasingly through China’s own payment infrastructure. But no Chinese tank or missile has appeared on the Ukrainian battlefield, and that is precisely the point. Beijing supplies the engine and the fuel of Russia’s war machine whilst keeping its hands off the trigger. We keep searching for the smoking gun, and in doing so we miss that China is supplying everything one needs to manufacture it.
As Sir Julian Lewis observes in his foreword to the report, the temptation in Western capitals has been to regard the Beijing-Moscow relationship as a matter of temporary wartime convenience, an arrangement that a ceasefire, a change in the Kremlin, or renewed Western engagement might dissolve. The evidence points the other way. This is a sustained, expanding partnership whose alignment predates February 2022; the “no limits” declaration came three weeks before the invasion, and the first joint Sino-Russian proposal for a new global order dates back to 1997. Nor is there a Sino-Russian estrangement available for a latter-day Reverse Nixon to exploit. Washington’s recent attempts to drive a wedge between the two capitals have, if anything, pushed them closer together.
The piecemeal audit also obscures the question that has received far too little attention: what does China get out of all this? The tactical dividends are obvious – discounted energy, captured markets, a Russia sliding into Eurasian clienthood, all achieved while maintaining the narrative of neutrality. But the strategic prize is larger. The war has accelerated Beijing’s central project: the construction of a parallel institutional architecture, in finance, in governance norms, in technology standards, culminating in the Global Governance Initiative unveiled last September. The freezing of nearly three hundred billion dollars of Russian reserves handed Beijing its most persuasive argument to the Global South: this, Beijing says, is what the dollar system can do to you. And China’s governance blueprints quietly treat European security as something requiring Russian consent – a claim that, if normalised, would hollow out the principle that European states determine their own security arrangements.
There is, however, an encouraging finding buried in the data: pressure works. When Washington threatened Chinese banks and firms with secondary sanctions in late 2023, the value of Chinese dual-use exports to Russia dipped, even as China’s share of those flows remained dominant. Beijing throttled volume without ceding position, proof that it is genuinely sensitive to costs. The failure is that we have applied it timidly and inconsistently.
The policy conclusion follows. Britain and its allies need a unified analytical framework that tracks Sino-Russian cooperation across the economic, military, diplomatic, and governance domains together – whether or not the war is active – rather than reacting to each new customs revelation in isolation. Secondary sanctions must be enforced consistently, even at short-term trade cost. And China’s governance vocabulary – “indivisible security”, “multipolarity”, “sovereign equality” – must be read for what it means in Chinese diplomatic usage, not what it sounds like in ours.
China’s support for Russia is incremental by design: calibrated, deniable, always one step short of decisive retaliation. But incremental does not mean marginal. Taken together, the increments amount to the difference between a Russia that can sustain this war and one that could not. It is time we assessed them together.
