Since Monday, July 8, China and Belarus have been conducting joint military exercises near the Belarusian city of Brest, just five kilometers from the border with NATO member Poland. These maneuvers, dubbed "Eagle Assault" and scheduled to last 11 days, began on the eve of the North Atlantic Alliance summit, which is taking place in Washington from July 9 to 11. They are a response to the West's "aggressive foreign policy towards Belarus," which is a close ally of Moscow and has been sanctioned for its involvement in the war in Ukraine, and to "Ukrainian provocation," said Vladimir Kupriyanyuk, deputy chief of the general staff of the Belarusian armed forces, on Friday.

According to the Chinese defense ministry, forces from both countries are to simulate "hostage rescue and counter-terrorism operations." The few official photos of soldiers attached to China's northern theater command disembarking from troop transport planes at a Belarusian base suggest that this is a relatively modest deployment in terms of manpower.

However, just a stone's throw from a NATO border, these exercises are highly symbolic and represent a political challenge to the West. They are a response to America's desire to make China and security in the Asia-Pacific region an increasingly explicit priority for the Alliance. And they bring China – which is posing as a neutral player in the war in Ukraine, even though it has never condemned the Russian invasion and supplies Moscow with the machinery and materials that keep its arms factories going – to just 50 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

For Belarus, "it's a way of threatening the West, by showing that Lukashenko has the power to establish China's military presence and influence in the heart of Europe and on NATO's borders," explained Valery Kavaleuski, executive director of the Warsaw-based Euro-Atlantic Affairs Agency. These exercises come just days after Belarus joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which met on July 4 in Astana, Kazakhstan, and whose members (China, Russia, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Belarus) advocate a "multipolar" world order against American unilateralism.

"Given the timing and location of these exercises, China intends to send out a number of signals," noted Bonny Lin, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American institute. It shows European states that might be tempted to support the American demand for NATO to focus more on Asia, that Beijing has the power to cause trouble on their continent. But, having already organized exercises with Belarusian forces on its own soil in 2018, China can claim that the timing of these exercises is independent of this context. It is also showing some solidarity to Russia, at a time when Ukraine's backers are discussing what support to give Kyiv.

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