When Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in May 2025, he called the bond between the two countries “unbreakable.” China and Russia, Xi said, should be “friends of steel.”
Xi was in Moscow to help Putin celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, an appearance that experts said was heavy on projecting a unified relationship between Beijing and Moscow, with the pomp and circumstance of a huge military parade in Red Square as a backdrop. The leaders signed what CCP state media called a “joint statement on further deepening China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era,” according to CNN, which noted that Putin and Xi typically release such “wide-ranging joint statements” after their meetings. The visit was Xi’s 11th to Russia since becoming CCP leader in 2013, and the two have met on more than 40 occasions, according to a May 2025 BBC story.
The CCP’s support of Putin’s war on Ukraine — as well as the backing of Russia by Iran and North Korea — have led some to conclude that those nations now form an “axis of upheaval.” Some view their cooperation — whether in military aid, commerce or policy — as an effort to weaken the global standing of the United States. Other experts say that view overstates the relationship between China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, which is not a formal alliance. The countries may share anti-Western sentiments, the experts say, but their interests often diverge, and their assistance remains transactional. Unlike those autocracies, the relationships forged between the U.S. and its allies are crucial to protecting a stable and open international system.
“The strength of our alliances and partnerships gives us the asymmetric advantage that our competitors do not enjoy,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said in a February 2024 interview with the U.S. military journal Joint Force.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), in a 2024 analysis, noted that even though China and Russia have deepened their strategic partnership over the past decade, they are not formal allies. “[T]he countries’ alignment is driven more by their common rivalry with the United States than by any natural affinity,” the CFR said. If Xi’s characterization of the friendship between Beijing and Moscow is one of steel, then many say a more accurate description is to a malleable alloy such as tin — especially when viewed in comparison to those of the U.S. and its allies.
“We see a lot of exchanges between the two men and patriotic displays of togetherness,” Mathieu Boulègue, of the Center for European Policy Analysis, said of Xi and Putin in the BBC report. “They can be friends on one end or cooperating on one end and then ripping each other apart on others and actually be competitors in certain aspects of their relationship. We get wowed by the symbolism. There’s a lot of performance around this relationship. But it is interesting to look at the real substance.”
The substance includes Moscow’s mistrust of China. In June 2025, The New York Times newspaper reported that a secretive unit within the FSB, Russia’s domestic security agency, refers to the Chinese Communist Party as “the enemy” and a security threat. The analysis is in an internal planning document obtained by the Times that addresses China’s increasing espionage and efforts to acquire sensitive Russian military technology. It warns that China spies on Russian operations in Ukraine to learn about warfare and Western weapons. The analysts worry that Chinese academics are laying groundwork for claims on Russian territory, and that China is conducting espionage in the Arctic. The document, which may be a draft, dates from 2023 or 2024, according to the Times, which said the cybercrime group Ares Leaks obtained it. The Times said it shared the document with six Western intelligence agencies and all deemed it authentic.
A New Axis?
Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine, of the Center for a New American Security, are credited with coining “axis of upheaval” to not only describe the growing alignment between China and Russia but also their increasing cooperation with Iran and North Korea. They chronicled one example in the May-June 2024 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs: “In the early morning of January 2, [2024], Russian forces launched a massive missile attack on the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv. … The incident was notable not just for the harm it caused but also because it showed that Russia was not alone in its fight. The Russian attack that day was carried out with weapons fitted with technology from China, missiles from North Korea and drones from Iran. Over the past two years, all three countries have become critical enablers of Moscow’s war machine in Ukraine.” Those countries continue to enable that machine. Examples of the aid and Russian reciprocity:
China: “As Russia faced isolation from the West, China increased its engagement with Moscow, keeping the Russian economy afloat through purchases of oil and other natural resources and supplying Russia with critical dual-use technology and components to sustain the war effort,” The New York Times said in a May 2025 analysis. Ukraine said that Beijing is supplying a range of critical products to Russia. Oleh Ivashchenko, the chief of Ukrainian foreign intelligence, told the Ukrinform state news agency: “There is information that China supplies tooling machines, special chemical products, gunpowder and components specifically to defense manufacturing industries,” Reuters reported in May 2025.
Elizabeth Wishnick, a senior research scientist for the Center for Naval Analyses, told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) in February 2025 testimony: “The Chinese government claims it does not send lethal aid to Russia for its war effort in Ukraine, but 78% of Russian imports of semiconductors and 96% of smart cards — important components for a wide range of military technologies — come from China. Chinese companies also provide … navigation equipment, jamming devices, aircraft parts, drones, rifles, ammunition and trucks.”
North Korea: In May 2025, the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team — a group of 11 nations that includes the U.S. and key allies — released a report that said Pyongyang had supplied at least 100 ballistic missiles, some 9 million rounds of artillery and rocket ammunition, and more than 11,000 troops for use against Ukraine, according to The Wall Street Journal newspaper. The report called those transfers “flagrant violations” of United Nations resolutions. In return, Russian aid to North Korea has included military funding, air defenses and much more refined petroleum than it is allowed to produce under U.N. sanctions, according to the report.
Iran: Tehran has supplied attack drones and missiles used against Ukraine. In return, Russia has sent weapons experts to Iranian missile production facilities to consult on their efforts, Reuters reported. In May 2025, Iran’s parliament approved a 20-year strategic partnership between the two countries. The agreement included closer defense cooperation.
Kendall-Taylor, also in testimony to the USCC, spoke on the historical use of the term axis, which grew partly out of the expansionist ambitions of Germany, Italy and Japan in the mid-1930s as well as those nations’ authoritarian ideologies. The term was first used by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in a 1936 speech. Mussolini described Italy’s relationship with Nazi Germany as an “axis around which all European States animated by a desire for peace may collaborate on troubles.” Kendall-Taylor told the USCC that the term best describes “what China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are doing — they are collaborating on their troubles. Their shared aim of weakening the United States and its power and influence provides such strong motivation for their actions. This new axis of upheaval, then, is best thought of as a collection of dissatisfied states converging on a shared purpose of overturning U.S. leadership, along with the principles, rules and institutions that underlie the prevailing international system.”
A Different Axis
Alexander Gabuev, writing in the April 2024 issue of Foreign Affairs, described the relationship between Beijing and Moscow as the sole axis among those dissatisfied states. “The Kremlin now assesses every relationship with a foreign power through a lens of three essential considerations: whether this relationship can help Russia directly on the battlefield in Ukraine, whether it can help sustain the Russian economy and circumvent sanctions, and whether it can help Moscow push back against the West and punish the United States and its allies for supporting Kyiv. Russia’s relationship with China emphatically checks all three boxes.”
While Gabuev noted three considerations in the Sino-Russian relationship, Kimberly Donovan, director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative for the Atlantic Council think tank, said her research showed only one issue uniting all four countries mentioned as the axis. “Being sanctioned by the West is one of the few things these rogue states have in common,” she told the USCC. “Sanctions severely restrict these countries’ access to the U.S.-led global financial system, limit their ability to trade in commodities, generate revenue and import sophisticated technology. Donovan said her team’s work at the Atlantic Council concluded that “China is enabling Russia as well as Iran to circumvent and evade Western sanctions.” In all, she said, those countries and North Korea have devised elaborate systems — including the use of third-country proxies and maritime “shadow fleets” of tankers to circumvent sanctions on commodities such as oil. Donovan uses a different description for the countries’ joint efforts: “We have coined this network the axis of evasion.”
Advantages and Disadvantages
Wishnick, who also testified before the USCC, acknowledged the deepening military ties among the nations — especially those of China and Russia. She noted that development of their partnership began in the mid-1990s and “facilitated China’s aim to become a maritime great power and focus military resources in the Indo-Pacific.” Today, military exercises between China and Russia help the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Liberation Army Navy gain modern battlefield insights that both services lack. “Chinese military analysts … are mining the [Ukraine] conflict for information about the role of new technologies in warfare, the performance of particular systems, the role of ground forces … and the challenges of combined operations,” Wishnick said.
Despite the countries’ combined efforts, as well as naval exercises held with Iran, Wishnick points out some important distinctions. “China and Russia have participated in more than 100 bilateral and multilateral exercises since 2005, with half taking place since 2017. The increased frequency needs to be kept in perspective — NATO conducts approximately 100 exercises in an average year,” she told the USCC. “For both China and Russia, signaling is an important part of the joint exercises, which often precede or follow exercises by the U.S. and its allies.” While China and Russia have expanded the range and complexity of their efforts, it has not led to a more unified fighting force: The U.S. Department of War finds that the Sino-Russian exercises have “only modestly improved their capabilities and interoperability,” Wishnick said.
“Unlike the NATO alliance, where the diverse membership trains for combined operations, China and Russia largely train together to improve confidence-building and develop familiarity with their different technologies and approaches to combat,” Wishnick said.
The Allied Difference
In January 2024, U.S. forces deployed across the Atlantic Ocean and joined NATO allies in Steadfast Defender, the Alliance’s largest exercise since the Cold War. Then-U.S. Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said in a news release that it “demonstrated the incredible strength of the trans-Atlantic bond between NATO Allies in Europe and those in North America.” The exercise involved 90,000 troops from all 32 NATO nations as well as ships and aircraft in what NATO called an “impressive display of unity and interoperability.” In contrast to China and Russia, NATO allies have worked to improve their bonds and collaboration since the alliance’s founding in 1949. In operating together, the U.S. and its allies share common doctrine, procedures and bases. China enters partnerships; it does not build alliances.
In the Indo-Pacific, there also is strong defense cooperation among the U.S., NATO members and regional allies. The U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) is the world’s largest international maritime exercise and includes Australia, India, Japan and South Korea. Another exercise, Talisman Sabre, had more than 40,000 military personnel from 19 participating nations in its 2025 iteration, which included the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and first-time participant Papua New Guinea. Those are just two examples of several large-scale exercises that enhance interoperability and readiness among the U.S. and allies and partners in the region. There are also organizations such as the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that work to promote stability and cooperation. In 2023, ASEAN held its first joint military exercise that focused on noncombat missions such as disaster response and maritime security.
Combined exercises between China and Russia, meanwhile, lead to the assumption that they “coordinate their foreign policies, which they do not,” Wishnick told the USCC. Writing in March 2025 for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, he said: “Although authoritarian states share an overriding interest in regime security and political survival, this does not necessarily mean that we should expect solidarity among similarly disposed regimes or believe that they would inevitably form an anti-Western axis. Despite the deepening Sino-Russian partnership, there are multiple areas of divergence. At this juncture Chinese and Russian officials have made a political decision to emphasize their areas of agreement — all of their joint statements do this, omitting any areas of discord.”
“The … partnership between Beijing and Moscow appears to be a pragmatic, transactional relationship with strategic consequences for both sides, but one that is motivated by complementary rather than identical interests,” Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in November 2024. “By any measure, it falls well short of the … World War II ‘axis.’ Moreover, close observers of Chinese policy maintain that Beijing is ‘uneasy’ with Moscow’s undisguised war of aggression. In private conversations, Chinese scholars do not criticize Russian policy overtly but do not endorse it either.”
Foster Klug, a news director for The Associated Press whose reporting focuses on the Indo-Pacific, echoed those who see cooperation between U.S. competitors as mostly transactional.
Klug called a September 2025 military parade in Beijing, where Kim and Putin stood with host Xi, as “simply more of the self-interested, diplomatic jockeying” that has long marked the region’s power dynamics. “Each of these leaders, in other words, is out for himself,” Klug wrote.