Yet another very telling sign of the growing military alliance between Russia and China

As foreign leaders have begun to arrive in Sochi, something quite unique happened at the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping.  First, he was greeted by President Putin, like all the other heads of state, but then the two men left of a special communications room to speak with the senior commanders of the Russian and Chinese navies.  The amazing thing was that this was a joint videoconference which saw the Russian and Chinese naval commanders reporting to their respective Presidents while both sides stood literally shoulder to shoulder.  See for yourself a photo of this event from the naval side:

I personally find this both quite amazing and very telling: at a time when the USA is constantly provoking and bullying China (over territorial waters) and Russia (over the Ukraine), and at a time when senior US academics are seriously suggesting that a war with Russia might happen, Russia and China are showing signs of not only political, but also operational collaboration.

I think that the message is clear.  The only question is: is anybody in Washington paying any attention?

The Saker

Russian and Chinese ground forces practice interoperability in the “Peaceful Mission 2013” joint military exercise

I have recently written about the large scale military exercises conducted by Russia in the Far East and I remember that some clueless commentator (from the BBC I think) wrote that while the maritime component was directed at Japan, the land component was directed at China.  At the time I did not think that it was worth spending any time debunking this silly notion, but today I will mention that far from threatening each other, the Russian and Chinese military are, yet again, conducting joint training and military exercises.  While in the previous joint exercises Russia and China had trained together on the seas (Joint Sea 2013), this time they are doing so on land.

The latest Sino-Russian joint military exercise, called “Peaceful Mission 2013”, is being conducted at the Chebarkul military training grounds in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region and involved armor and artillery (about 70 pieces of heavy equipment, such equipment, including tanks, armored personnel carriers, reconnaissance patrol, 120 mm caliber howitzers, 152 mm self-propelled artillery and a number of engineering and maintenance vehicles), army aviation (Chinese helicopters crew from the Shenyang Military Region few over 4'000km lead by Russian helicopters and special forces units (350 soldiers).  In spite of that big firepower, these exercises were characterized by both Russian and Chinese officials as "anti-terrorist" training.  Cute.

Here is a short Russian TV report just to give you sense of what this all looks like and to gauge the mood of the participants:


Bottom line: far from threatening each other (an old dream of the Anglo elites) Russia and China are making unprecedented efforts to jointly train together with a strong stress on interoperability.  In other words, the two countries are practicing joint military operations against a common enemy.

My guess is that the next thing we will see are joint military operations by Russian and Chinese air forces.

The Saker