As Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds into its fifth summer amid signs that Russian forces are losing ground, global leaders are renewing calls for China to broker an end to the hostilities.
During their recent summit in Beijing, U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly urged Chinese leader Xi Jinping to use his influence with Moscow to bring the conflict, which has now gone on longer than World War I, to a close. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz voiced similar hope ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own visit to China the following week.
Yet despite the economic and political leverage that Beijing wields, analysts and close observers of the war are deeply skeptical that China’s interests favor a vanquished Putin. While Russia may not be able to win the war, Beijing doesn’t want Russia to lose, either.
This is a “dangerous moment” because the battlefield balance “is tilting slightly back in favor of our Ukrainian friends,” James Crabtree, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in May at the Globsec security forum in Prague. “Any situation in which Russia is in a harder position, China will likely do more to support Moscow,” he said, by providing Russia with the means to keep the conflict on a steady simmer.
Beijing has long maintained its neutrality and called for a negotiated solution to the war, which by one recent estimate has killed up to 450,000 Russian and 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers since Russia’s all-out invasion in February 2022.
But its diplomatic efforts have yielded no tangible results, which some experts believe may be by design. As China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, conceded last year, Beijing doesn’t want to see a Russian defeat, in part because the war has kept Washington’s attention away from China. Put another way, playing both the peacemaker and agitator serves China’s interests.
“China provides a lot of support [to Russia’s war effort], but it stays below the red line of not providing overt military aid,” said Richard Weitz, director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington. “That allows Russia to benefit in a way the Russians are comfortable with, and the Chinese to advance their interests without suffering too much cost.”
Economic Ties, Temporary Interests
The Kremlin’s initial aim of a quick victory in Ukraine has become a protracted conflict that has tested Europe’s resolve and rewritten global alliances. Today, Russia maintains control in about 20% of the country and continues to strike Ukrainian cities. Putin, who has acknowledged the war’s toll on personnel and infrastructure, recently dismissed a peace proposal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and reiterated his objective of fully capturing the eastern regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has increased attacks on Russian oil and military sites and extended its long-range drone capabilities. A fresh barrage of drone attacks in Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014, has further eroded Moscow’s sense of security.
For China, a simmering war in Europe serves several purposes, analysts say. First, it diverts the West’s focus away from China’s own backyard. Second, it helps highlight lessons that Beijing may one day look to apply to a Taiwan contingency. In addition to military strategy, China, which has suffered Western sanctions for its support of Russia’s war, is likely learning how to evade similar restraints.
Perhaps most importantly, it has forced Russia into an economic and political dependency that benefits China.
Since the start of the war, China-Russia bilateral trade has boomed. Between 2020 and 2024, total trade volume more than doubled, to $245 billion, before dipping to $220 billion last year, according to Chinese data. These trade flows have been crucial in helping Russia to navigate the isolation imposed by Western sanctions.
But the relationship is structurally unbalanced. Russian exports consist mostly of energy and raw materials, which China purchases at deeply reduced prices. China’s exports, meanwhile, are dominated by manufactured goods, such as automobiles and consumer electronics, and dual-use technologies.
This imbalance carries risk for Putin and the Russian economy, analysts say, as local producers struggle to compete with a flood of Chinese imports. Russian car manufacturers, for instance, have shrunk their workweek to four days as domestic output has slowed amid a surge in Chinese vehicles.
“The asymmetric trade structure means that Russia is effectively integrated into Chinese supply chains on Beijing’s terms,” Tamas Matura, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, argues in a new assessment of Sino-Russian economic ties.
Eventually, this dependence will end, experts predict, as neither Russia nor China benefit from a one-sided relationship. Throughout the war, China has maintained strong commercial ties with Ukraine; before Russia’s full-scale invasion, bilateral trade approached $19 billion, with Ukraine exporting raw materials and food products, and importing consumer goods and high-tech equipment. But once the war concludes, Moscow will likely look to limit Beijing’s influence in Kyiv.
“There is no friendship between China and Russia,” Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s former defense minister, said in May at Globsec. “This interest is temporary.”
For now, though, China’s dominance in this marriage of economic convenience is among the key reasons why global leaders believe Beijing could do more in the name of peace.
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