While Beijing has long called for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine, its diplomatic efforts to bring peace have yielded no tangible results. That may be by design.
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.
War’s Dual Reality
Trade isn’t Beijing’s only source of influence. In this war, China is on both sides of the front lines.
For Russia, Chinese dual-use technology, materials, and support has been crucial for keeping its war machine operating. Experts have concluded that Chinese exports of lithium-ion batteries and fiber-optic cables, among other technologies, are powering Moscow’s attack drones, while Chinese know-how has bolstered Russia’s domestic drone production.
China has also reportedly trained Russian soldiers on drone and counter-drone warfare. While Russia and China have conducted several joint military exercises since 2022, the revelation of a covert Chinese training program suggests Beijing’s involvement has intensified. The program, first reported by Reuters in May and dating to at least July 2025, was recently confirmed by the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas.
Beijing insists it remains neutral in the war and has denied claims of directly aiding Moscow’s military campaign. But Ukrainian leaders are adamant.
“China is helping Russia in terms of technologies, in terms of production of components, and in terms of circumventing sanctions to obtain Western technologies,” Olena Khomenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian who chairs the chamber’s subcommittee on defense procurement, told Transitions on the sidelines of the Globsec forum.
“We’re suffering,” Khomenko said. “Just a few days ago, we had 20 people killed during one massive, combined attack, where drones and missiles of different types were used, and all of them had components [from] China.”
Complicating the picture, Ukraine’s military response is also dependent on Chinese technology for its own drone operations.
“It’s like dual reality,” said Reznikov, the former defense minister. “Yes, we’re using Chinese technology, because it’s a war. Our soldiers are in trenches, and for them, it doesn’t matter what’s made in China. They need weaponry right now.”
Kyiv’s dependence on Chinese hardware has waned as its own domestic drone production has matured. In 2025, local manufacturers churned out about 4 million robotic and autonomous systems; roughly 38% of those relied on Chinese components, down from nearly 90% the year before, according to the Snake Island Institute, a Kyiv-based think tank.
European leaders are committed to supporting Ukraine’s defense. Ahead of next week’s NATO summit in Ankara, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte predicted that the alliance “will commit to providing sustainable and predictable, long-term security assistance for Ukraine,” and called on the continent’s defense industry to “scale up” deliveries.
Rutte’s call followed the European Commission’s release on 25 June of the first tranche of a 90 billion euro loan package, which includes 6 billion euros for drone production.
But as Euronews reporter Jorge Liboreiro wrote following the announcement at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Poland, the EU drone funding won’t carry “ ‘Made in Europe’ requirements because Ukraine needs to buy cheap components from China.”
Post-Conflict Contradictions
Beijing has taken pains to distance itself publicly from Russia’s military project. Last year, after what analysts interpreted as Russian attempts to push China into accepting Moscow’s narrative for the war – to counter NATO’s eastward expansion – China’s international aid agency sought to change the subject, stressing its commitment to reconstruction.
“We are ready to continue to provide assistance within our capacity according to the wishes of parties involved, which of course includes post-war reconstruction,” Li Ming, a spokesperson for the China International Development Cooperation Agency, told Xinhua.
Chinese NGOs and government agencies are already providing aid to Ukraine. China AidData, a U.S. research lab based at the College of William & Mary, which tracks China’s international loans and grants, counts 109 current projects, valued at $3.4 billion. Sectors include energy, health care, and education.
In February, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said China had pledged additional funds to help rebuild energy infrastructure damaged by Russian shelling. He didn’t provide details.
For now, China’s aid and redevelopment contributions are a fraction of what’s needed. Dmytro Yefremov, an associate professor of international relations at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, has only “modest expectations” for Chinese involvement in Ukraine’s postwar recovery. He argues that a limited aid budget and conditional loan strategies will keep Beijing’s reconstruction contributions low.
Still, Ukraine’s leaders aren’t ready to write China off. Despite Beijing’s role in perpetuating the conflict, when the fighting does eventually end – with or without its help – China will be part of the postwar conversation.
Asked if the war had permanently damaged the Ukraine-China relationship, Khomenko, the parliamentarian, conceded that “it’s controversial,” adding: “Let’s see how China will act and behave, and then we can comment on the prospects of the Ukraine-China relationship.”
Greg Bruno is an award-winning journalist, editor, and digital storyteller who is the author of Blessings from Beijing: Inside China’s Soft-Power War on Tibet. He is currently the senior program manager at the Prague-based Bakala Foundation while also working as a freelance content creator.
