Russia has agreed to help train China in a way that could help the Chinese invade nearby Taiwan, according to a new report. It’s the latest sign of military cooperation between the two superpowers.
Why China needs Russia
The report is based on 800 pages of documents that were originally obtained by Hacktivist group Black Moon. They were independently verified by a British think tank and reviewed by The Washington Post.
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Those documents show Russia agreeing to equip and train Chinese airborne battalions and share their expertise in airdropping armored vehicles.
That would be necessary knowledge if China invaded Taiwan, which is roughly 100 miles off the coast of mainland China.
“They would have to get their troops and tanks and so forth across the Taiwan Strait,” Scott Simon, professor at the University of Ottawa, whose research has focused on Taiwan, told Straight Arrow News. “And those ships taking them over there would be just sitting like ducks in the water, just putting targets for the Taiwanese side to take out, even without the U.S. getting involved in that.”
Moscow’s military has greater expertise than Beijing’s when it comes to airborne troops, according to military analysts the Post spoke with.
“Invading Taiwan is very different than invading Ukraine,” Simon said. “So, for the Russians, they just had to drive their tanks across the borders. And in the case of a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan, they would have to, first of all, get their troops and logistics and equipment across the Taiwan Strait.”
What Russia’s offering
The documents show Russia has agreed to sell dozens of amphibious vehicles, self-propelled anti-tank guns and airborne armored personnel carriers to China.
That comes out to around $584 million worth of equipment.
The documents also reveal several rounds of negotiations, including a meeting in April 2024, at which China requested that Russia expedite the delivery of specific vehicles and make its weaponry more compatible with Chinese technology.
The British think tank RUSI said the training and transfers will give China’s air force “expanded air maneuver capability” that will offer options against Taiwan, the Philippines and other island nations.
“If you drop a tank in, it’s not as if they’re going to be able to just, when they run out of fuel, that they’re going to be able to just drive up into a gas station,” Simon said. “You have to have the logistics and supplies there, which is really difficult to do across such a large distance.”
Russian-Chinese cooperation
This is the latest sign of cooperation between the two countries.
“They desperately need one another in their wars,” Simon said. “That’s why we saw Putin show up in Beijing for that military parade.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping did the same several months ago for a Russian military parade.
Their two militaries also held 14 joint exercises together just last year, nearly twice as many as a decade ago.
China has also offered tech support to Russia for the war in Ukraine.
US response
All of this cooperation has caught the attention of the United States.
While the U.S. hasn’t directly responded to this latest report, the U.S. ambassador to China called Chinese support for Russia in the Ukraine war a “major mistake.”
The U.S. is also aware of what an invasion of Taiwan would look like.
“The United States has the superior military over Japan,” Simon said. “When Taiwan was a Japanese colony, during World War II, they thought about invading it, and they decided that, because of the geography, it would be extremely difficult, and that’s not worth the risk.”
Simon added that avoiding war in this scenario is best for all.
“I think that much more likely than an invasion would be, say, a quarantine or blocking off the island so that ships can’t get in and out, and then trying to force the Taiwan government to the negotiating table, and that would just be a breakdown in our economy,” Simon said. “So, it’s very much in our interest to keep the economy going that we depend upon. You know, the semiconductor ships [from] there, but it’s more than that.”
Taiwan is a key U.S. ally, despite the countries maintaining only unofficial relations, and the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act commits the U.S. to supporting Taiwanese self-defense.
“I think the first troops on the ground from outside of Taiwan would be U.S.,” Simon said.
China-Taiwan relations
China has long considered Taiwan a Chinese territory, but the self-governed island of 23 million people and its president, Lai Ching-te, have strongly maintained the country’s sovereignty.
China is “realizing that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to convince the Taiwanese to just give up their democracy and become part of the People’s Republic of China,” Simon said. “And so, they’re increasingly belligerent in terms of their different threats to Taiwan, which are mostly the gray-zone type tactics.”
Ching-te just won his election last year, but other politicians in Taiwan hold different views.
“There’s also an opposition in the legislative end, which holds the purse strings of the military budget,” Simon said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to that, and it’s possible that in a future election, a more China-friendly government could be elected and negotiate some kind of a deal. So I think that China’s more likely to wait for that than they are to take any dramatic military action.”
