US warns NATO: China helped Russia ‘reconstitute militarily’

China has enabled Russia’s military to “reconstitute” to a degree that threatens Ukraine and the wider NATO alliance, according to senior U.S. officials.

“The warnings were explicit,” a source familiar with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s message to allies told the Financial Times. “There has been a shift, and it was felt in the room. … This was a new development. It was very striking.”

Blinken delivered that message in a series of discussions in Paris and Brussels, where he traveled this week to mark the 75th anniversary of NATO with alliance counterparts. As Blinken conducted his diplomatic tour, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, the State Department’s second-highest-ranking official, offered a glimpse of U.S. assessments that suggests the extent to which the war in Ukraine represents a contest not only with Moscow but also indirectly with Beijing.

“We have assessed over the course of the last couple of months that Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily,” Campbell told the Center for a New American Security on Wednesday. “Russia has retooled and now poses a threat … but not just to Ukraine. Its newfound capabilities pose a longer-term challenge to stability in Europe and threatens NATO allies.”

U.S. and European officials have worked throughout the conflict to discourage Chinese President Xi Jinping. And while Moscow has relied more openly on North Korea and Iran for supplies of ready-made weapons, China is regarded as a key enabler of Russia’s military-industrial base.

“China’s now importing a large number of precision metalworking tools to Russia, which are largely, if not exclusively, used in military production,” Chris Miller, an American Enterprise Institute scholar and Tufts University professor who specializes in Russian foreign policy and semiconductor supply chains, told the Washington Examiner. “Across the board, high-end manufacturing equipment — China’s sending it to Russia. There’s not much high-end manufacturing in Russia today other than [to produce] military equipment.”

Campbell, who took office at the State Department in February after a three-year stint as Biden’s top official for the Indo-Pacific at the White House National Security Council, said Russia’s retooling was made possible “with the support of China in particular.” His statement preceded a new round of Western statements that the outcome of the war in Ukraine will have far-reaching ramifications.

“We know that our security is not regional. It is global,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday in Brussels. “The war in Ukraine illustrates this clearly. Russia’s friends in Asia are vital for continuing this war of aggression. China is propping up Russia’s war economy. In return, Moscow is mortgaging its future to Beijing.”

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Stoltenberg made that remark at the outset of a NATO meeting with the foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand. That Indo-Pacific quartet began to send representatives to the NATO foreign ministerial in 2020, and the countries’ heads of state began to attend the annual NATO leaders summit in 2022. Their participation at those meetings is emblematic of increasing cooperation between the European and Indo-Pacific wings of the U.S. alliance network, a trend that U.S. officials hope to continue.

“The idea really is the linking strategically of these two critical geographic vectors of the Indo-Pacific and Europe, and talking with Europeans extensively about the Indo-Pacific, and then also working with the Indo-Pacific on challenges like Ukraine,” Campbell said. “We’ve seen that those crosscutting linkages and engagements multiply exponentially.”