Eurasia Press & News
Contrary to the popular assessments of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, Chinese and Russian national interests primarily converge in the Asia Pacific and Arctic, not in Europe and Ukraine. For the last two decades, the United States has not paid adequate attention to this convergence at our peril. Overall assessments by the US national security community, think-tanks, and academia of the strategic partnership have almost universally fallen short and downplayed the Russia-China convergence.[1] This is a mistake. While establishing its sphere of influence over Europe will remain Russia’s priority, Russia could go to war to support China in the event of a US-China conflict in the Asia Pacific.
It is true that China has done much to support Russia’s war in Ukraine. While it has avoided direct involvement, it remains Russia’s primary enabler. Albeit China does not want to undermine its own economic interests in Europe. Russia’s position in the Asia Pacific is significantly different than that of China in Europe; thus, there is less risk in how it pursues its strategic interests, and that may be fundamentally preparing Russia to elevate the Sino-Russian entente to a military alliance in the Asia Pacific. President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s elites bet their legacy not only on the forceful realignment of the international system, but on the country’s future economic prosperity anchored in the Sino-Russian relationship, including the collaborative development and use of the Arctic and Russia’s Northern Sea Route.
As such, Putin has implemented a series of Russian maritime doctrine and Arctic policy changes, undertaken force structure and alignment changes involving a geographic reprioritization, and empowered Russian elites to participate in supporting the Sino-Russian strategic partnership involving these mutually important regions. These actions convey the importance Putin places on the pursuit of Russian national interests and suggest he may be slowly preparing Russia to support its most important treaty partner in the event of a US-China conflict in the region.
Russia’s Pacific Pivot
It is well known that in November of 2011, the Obama administration announced the US Pivot to Asia. But fewer noted that just over a year later, in June 2013, speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin essentially did the same. He announced a Russian pivot to the Asia-Pacific region. This announcement was perhaps later eclipsed by Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea, initiation of conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas, and its intervention in Syria’s Civil War in 2015. And given Russia’s history in announcing foreign policy declarations whereby its aspirations have resoundingly exceeded its actual abilities, it was easy to dismiss Putin’s Pacific pivot as mere rhetoric.
But Putin’s Pacific pivot represented something different: a doubling down on a slow but steady geopolitical turn away from the Euro-Atlantic centric international order toward a Eurasian-centric one. It was not just toward the Asia Pacific, but toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Unlike the US pivot, it was not focused on a threat posed by an adversary but toward gaining an ally in a larger geostrategic competition to balance against and enable the defeat of perceived US hegemony. Whether the Pacific Century proves to be a myth or a reality, a 2017 statement by Putin shows how he views the world: “The main struggle, which is now underway, is that for global leadership, and we are not going to contest China on this.” While one may naturally question Putin’s sincerity in making this statement with Russia’s failure to subjugate Ukraine in 2022, Putin has been forced to irreversibly commit Russia toward alignment with the PRC. As such, Putin has been unwavering in pursuing Russian strategic interests that ensure Russia is on the side it desires to prevail in the larger US-China geostrategic competition.
Russian Maritime Doctrine and Arctic Policy
Just five months into Russia’s war against Ukraine, in the wake of its colossal failure to militarily seize Kyiv, Putin announced fundamental changes to Russia’s Maritime Doctrine and Arctic policies. First, Putin signed a new version of Russia’s Maritime Doctrine that for the first time prioritized the Arctic and Pacific over the Atlantic and Europe. While the West was fixated on Ukraine and Putin’s efforts to coercively realign the European security architecture, Putin was declaring Russia a Pacific player and confidently imparting a grand vision of Russia as a global power. Some may argue this was putting the cart before the horse, but regardless he has continued down this path undeterred in his pursuit of Sino-Russian alignment in the Asia Pacific.
Second, he implemented several Arctic policy changes that included amending its law On Internal Sea Waters, Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone of the Russian Federation, its Strategy for the Development of Arctic Zone to 2035, and its Foundations of the Russian Federation’s State Policy in the Arctic to 2035.
At the national level, these doctrine changes and policy amendments reflect Putin’s vision of Russia’s future, and the importance placed on the need to establish sovereign control over the Northern Sea Route. They reflect the importance Putin places on Sino-Russian collaboration in the development and use of Russia’s Arctic portion of China’s Polar Silk Road. They are also consistent with Putin’s efforts to bring relevance to his Eurasian Economic Union project, which he envisions as a Russian-led economic powerhouse bridging the European Union and Chinese economies.
Some may characterize Putin’s prioritization of the Arctic and Pacific as untimely overconfidence based on the assumption of a rapid Russian victory in Ukraine. But this should be a signal to Western strategists that Russian leadership is confident in its pursuit of a grander strategic vision that requires Russia to go beyond its historic focus on the Euro-Atlantic and NATO to achieve its strategic objectives.
Instead, Putin’s actions during this period were at best footnoted by US national security experts as part of his ongoing fixation with realigning the international system to establish a multi-polar order. Western leaders have given this idea little credibility. Thus, Western analysts have missed some of the basic historical parallels and consequences associated with a previous Russian strategic force realignment, such as that which occurred following Putin’s confrontational speech at the 2007 Munich Security Forum. In the wake of Putin declaring his intent to abandon partnership with the West in favor of confrontation to compel acknowledgment of Russian strategic interests, Russia immediately undertook doctrine and policy changes and a force structure realignment and prioritization that confirmed its intent to pursue its interests within the interconnected, strategically vital maritime region encompassing the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, and Eastern Mediterranean.
Russian Military Developments in the Asia Pacific
Russia is a continental land power, and most analysts assess the Russian military through this lens. But it is the wrong one through which to analyze Russia’s military developments in the Asia Pacific. Employment and reconstituted potential of Russia’s ground forces is both unhelpful and irrelevant when considering the Asia Pacific. Trends associated with Russia’s Eastern Military District reveal that Russia has all but gutted its land forces there. This has been done through a protracted, intentional, and necessary process. It was done willingly during the normalization of Sino-Soviet relations, intentionally as part of follow-on Russian-PRC force reductions along the Sino-Russian border per Article 7 of the 2001 Sino-Russian Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation and Russian military ground force reduction reforms from 2008 to 2012, and later by necessity through the deployment of most its Far Eastern-based ground forces to fight in Ukraine. Analysts must instead look for historical trends involving previous Russian geostrategic pivots and their relevant impact on Russia’s force structure.
In light of the developments within the maritime domain associated with Russia’s war against Ukraine, it might seem superfluous to discuss Russian naval power within the Black Sea. But it is here that notable trends exist. In the wake of Russia’s lackluster military performance in Georgia in 2008, Putin committed to rebuilding the Black Sea Fleet to include naval, air, and long-range missile capabilities, made significant policy changes to support the Black Sea Fleet’s employment of those forces, aligned trusted and key personnel to oversee the effort, and then leveraged the changes to challenge the balance of power across the entirety of the region and into the Mediterranean. This shift was undertaken to pursue Russia’s larger strategic interests associated with challenging Western dominance within and beyond the Black Sea itself.
From 2013 to 2019 nearly 40 percent or more of Russian Navy ship and submarine procurement went to the Black Sea Fleet, thereby turning the Black Sea into what military analysis labelled a Russian lake. This force enabled Russia to dominate the Black Sea up until 2022—when Ukraine subsequently militarily dismantled key portions of it—and to project force into the Eastern Mediterranean to threaten NATO’s southern flank. The strategic emphasis placed on the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean was driven by Putin and overseen by the Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev. Russia’s strategic approach involved the announcement that Russian naval forces would maintain a permanent presence in the Mediterranean to include Kalibr land attack cruise missiles (SS-N-30A), as well as the negotiated expansion of bi-lateral access agreements involving port and airfields across the region. While each action the Russians took seemingly was minor, their aggregation contributed to the successful Russian intervention in Syria, expanded ties with Libya and Egypt, increased the ability of Russian professional military contractors to intervene in the Libyan Civil War, and bolstered Russia’s ability to project and logistically sustain activities across North Africa and into the Sahel, contributing to the perception that it was upending long-held US and European dominance in the region.
Similar to the naval force changes that occurred in the Black Sea from 2013 to 2019, since 2020, nearly 41 percent of all new Russian Navy ships and submarines have been assigned to its Pacific Fleet. This includes the mainstays of Russian Navy nuclear deterrence and power projection such as the Dolgoruky Strategic Ballistic Missile Nuclear Submarines, YASEN-M Guided Missile Nuclear Submarines, a multitude of smaller cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles, capable diesel submarines, frigates and smaller surface combatants, and special purpose and intelligence collection ships, such as the YANTAR Class used to map and interfere with undersea cables. Putin’s recent announcement of the $100 billion investment in the Russian Navy over the next twenty-five years came at the handing over of the sixth of the YASEM/YASEN-M Class submarines, the Perm, to the Russian Navy. Perm is slated to join the Pacific Fleet.
The geostrategic shift Putin implemented in the Black Sea for over a decade enabled his strategic confrontation with the United States and West. Similar trends such as those observed in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean since 2008 are now well underway in the Asia Pacific. Russian maritime doctrine and Arctic policy changes are merely a reflection of administrative changes that support and enable Sino-Russian collaboration within the region. It is through this lens that we should view Putin’s announcementand recent commitments on rebuilding Russian naval power to include prioritizing the Russian Pacific fleet. This announcement followed another, whereby he aligned trusted and key regime personnel to ensure the success of his geostrategic shift to the Asia Pacific. To validate the potential impact doctrine policy and military alignment changes may have, it is crucial to understand who is involved with Russian national interests in the Asia Pacific, for this is an indicator of its strategic importance and the priority Putin places on achieving results, as well as how this geostrategic shift may play out.
All the Kremlin’s Men . . . Are Committed to the Arctic and Pacific
The same person who led Russia’s Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean geostrategic realignment is now leading the shift to the Asia Pacific, the powerful Patrushev, Putin’s aide and former secretary of the National Security Council. In August of 2024, Putin signed a decree inaugurating the Maritime Collegium of the Russian Federation. Patrushev has been tasked with reinvigorating Russian naval power in the Arctic and along the Northern Sea Route and strengthening the defense and military partnership with China to move their common interests in the region forward.
Patrushev’s successful efforts to transform the Russian Navy and project it into the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean as part of Putin’s renewed confrontation with the West make him an ideal candidate to lead Russia’s maritime efforts in the Asia Pacific and Arctic. Because he led strategic change involving significant military doctrine, policy, force structure, and employment changes, we should not underestimate where the Asia-Pacific realignment may be headed. To this point, Patrushev’s involvement is already yielding changes that have upended long-held Western assumptions regarding Sino-Russian cooperation in the Arctic.
One month after Patrushev took the helm of the newly inaugurated Maritime Collegium, with great media fanfare, the Chinese Coast Guard undertook its first patrol into the Russian Arctic. This widely publicized event flew in the face of long-held Western intelligence assessments that Russia would attempt to prevent the PRC from operating in the Arctic. Furthermore, the Chinese public foray into the Arctic was followed by significant Sino-Russian bilateral naval activity in the Sea of Japan, the Aleutian Islands, and the Chukchi Sea. It may be a stretch to attribute this increased activity to Patrushev alone, so we should look more broadly at Russian national interests and who else among Kremlin elites is vested in Asia-Pacific and Arctic equities.
A report by the New Eurasian Strategies Centre entitled Mistress of the Sea: What’s New in the Kremlin’s Geostrategic Ambitions and Priorities provides insight into the extent of Russian leadership involvement in the Arctic and Pacific. It goes beyond Patrushev and his son Andrei’s association with the regions and reveals that major Russian power brokers associated with Russian business conglomerates, referred to as Chaebols, are involved in the Arctic and/or Pacific. Often, this alignment is through their association with Russia’s Northern Sea Route, which aligns to the Chinese Polar Silk Road, and the maritime transport projects meant to enable Russia’s economic future. The Chaebols involved include Gazprom, Rosneft, Rostec, Sberbank, VTB Bank, Rosatom, Rossiya Bank, and others. They are led by Putin’s closest allies such as Alexei Miller, Igor Sechin, Sergei Chemezov, German Gref, Alexei Likhachev, and Yuri Kovalchuk. These men represent a virtual who’s who of the Kremlin’s power vertical and a virtual state within the Russian statewhere the main state enterprises execute the strategic vision for and serve as the pillars of Russia’s future economic prosperity.
With so many Russian elites inextricably linked to Russia’s Arctic and Pacific economic success, and thus the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, it is natural that we have seen an exponential expansion of Sino-Russian military activities within the region. There should be no illusion that when placed in the context of Russia’s Pacific pivot, the recent changes to maritime doctrine, Arctic policies, and increased Russian military capability and capacity in the Pacific all aggregate to enable Putin to wield the military instrument of power in support of a larger strategic vision, a vision that enables Russia to fulfill its treaty obligations and exploit that position among the victors in the event of an Asia-Pacific conflict.
The Military Dimension of the Sino-Russian Entente
Over the last six years, trends and data show that there has been a significant increase in Sino-Russian bilateral and multilateral military exercises on a global scale, and the vast majority of Sino-Russian exercises and strategic maritime and air patrols have occurred within and near Russia’s portion of the First Island Chain in the vicinity of northern Japan and the US Aleutian Islands. A March 2023 study by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) entitled Russian-Chinese Military Cooperation presented forty-five global Sino-Russian bilateral and multilateral military events from 2005 to 2022. As of March 2025, a tally of additional exercises based on CNA criteria raises the number to well over sixty. Others show the numbers to be far higher. Using the CNA criteria, what is telling is that nearly 50 percent of the overall exercises and strategic air and maritime patrols since 2005 have occurred within and around the Russian portion of the First Island Chain.
The CNA study, among others, provides differing assessments of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership. They also reveal how Western experts have had to continuously reassess and revise Russia’s role in a US-China crisis in the Asia Pacific. Almost all fall short because they assess Sino-Russian military cooperation through the lens of tactical joint military operations. This is a fundamentally flawed view. The Chinese and Russian militaries are more likely to coordinate military actions in deconflicted sectors rather than integrate to conduct joint operations, much like the French and British forces did in World War I. While there were exceptions to the Entente’s military operations throughout World War I, coordination rather than integration, or joint operations, was the norm, as it will likely be within the Sino-Russian entente should it become a military alliance as part of a conflict within the Asia Pacific.
Furthermore, none of the aforementioned studies fundamentally views Russia’s role through the lens of either specific interests or historical trends like those outlined above. The studies do not address the realities that come with being a supporting treaty ally whose broader strategic goals and the economic interests of its elites are inextricably linked to the success of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, and the outcome of a conflict if one of its members is on the losing side. The depth and breadth of the continuous military interactions should continue to be debated for technological and tactical significance, but it has become resoundingly clear that the increase in bilateral military activities is directly linked to a shared strategic vision held by both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Putin. Russia’s change to its maritime doctrine, amendments to its Arctic policies, building out of its Pacific forces, and establishment of the Patrushev-led Maritime Collegium all aggregate to empower Russia within its treaty-based entente with China and ensure Putin can meet Russia’s treaty obligations, while playing a decisive role in support of the PRC in the event of a US-China conflict in the Asia Pacific.
Conclusion
Winston Churchill’s description of Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma ends with what he believed was the answer: Russian national interests. Sino-Russian national interests strategically converge in the Asia Pacific and Arctic—thus, it is the Asia Pacific where the structure of a military alliance has slowly emerged. Putin has pursued his own pivot to the Pacific that is guided by and aligned with the longest treaty in Sino-Russian history. There has not been meaningful discussion or debate among Western political and military leaders over Russia’s participation in such a conflict or how it might meet its treaty obligations to China should an Asia-Pacific conflict occur. This is a major cognitive gap that divorces US views on Russia in the Pacific from the realities associated with the strategic partnership and Russia’s national interests.
Russia pursued and implemented changes to Russian maritime doctrine and policies, undertook a historically relevant geographic reprioritization of military force structure, and aligned its elites to an economic vision that is inextricably linked to and supported by its military capabilities within the Sino-Russian strategic partnership. Putin has taken these actions because they are in Russia’s national interests. The historical parallels should not be dismissed, as they are based upon Putin’s unwavering vision for Russia, an alignment of Russia’s elites and specific leaders, and are fundamentally connected to Putin’s pursuit of forcibly realigning the international order and undermining US and Western influence. These changes have also contributed to an unparalleled and exponential increase in bilateral Sino-Russian military activities across the Asia Pacific, as well as multilateral activities at the global level. They may foreshadow what is to come. US national security leadership has been and continues to be doggedly reticent in admitting that Russia may have an active military role in a US-China conflict in the Asia Pacific. They appear comfortable operating within the institutionalized geographical constraints defined by US Euro-Atlantic and Asia-Pacific aligned combatant commands. The national interests of Russia and the stakes for Putin and Russia’s elites go well beyond these artificial boundaries, imparting an existentiality for them in the event of such a conflict. A US defeat of China in the Asia Pacific ends Russia’s future economic vision and its ability to pursue its confrontation with the West to achieve its strategic end-state entailing the realignment of the international order and establishment of spheres of influence dominated world sans American interference.
Putin, incorrectly perceived by many in the US national security community as a mere tactical opportunist, has committed Russia to a long-term strategic confrontation with the West. Therefore, we must fully consider how the strategic partnership is evolving and that realistically it is not in Russia’s national interests to remain a bystander in a US-China conflict in the Asia Pacific.
