China’s support for Russia has made it “a decisive enabler” of the conflict with Ukraine, according to the joint communique released by NATO on Wednesday.
Beijing has aided Moscow’s efforts to evade sanctions and to restore its defense industrial base to make up for the use of resources over the course of more than two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, though a senior NATO official told reporters that the alliance did not believe China had provided Russia with lethal aid as North Korea and Iran have done.
China “has become a decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine through its so-called ‘no limits’ partnership and its large-scale support for Russia’s defence industrial base,” the communique reads. “This increases the threat Russia poses to its neighbours and to Euro-Atlantic security.”
NATO’s director of policy planning, Benedetta Berti, described China as Russia’s “most critical enabler” during a Wednesday event at the NATO summit’s public forum and noted that Beijing’s support has grown over the last year.
“Compared to, let’s say, the Vilnius Summit, where we had a similar discussion about where we were in terms of the relationship between [China] and the Russian Federation, things have changed, and they’ve changed quite substantially. There is now a past dependency, the level of [Chinese] support for Russia’s war machine to enable and energize and allow to reconstitute its defense and technological industrial base,” she said.
Unlike Iran and North Korea, the former having provided Russia with attack drones and the latter artillery shells and cruise missiles, respectively, China has sought to portray itself as a neutral observer to the conflict instead of one providing support for a side.
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last month that Beijing should not be able to “maintain good relations with the West” while “fueling the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II.”
“At some point, and unless China changes course, allies need to impose a cost,” Stoltenberg said at the time. “There should be consequences.”