China is waging a proxy was against the West in Ukraine

From the Hill / Yahoo!News:

"Opinion - Xi Jinping is waging a proxy war against Trump in Ukraine

Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet, opinion contributors, July 10, 2025

In February, Chinese officials floated the idea of Xi Jinping hosting a peace summit with President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Team Trump wisely rejected Xi as an intermediary, given the growing military and economic alliance between Moscow and Beijing.

Xi’s offer was indeed a Trojan Horse, designed, at best, to obtain Ukraine’s unconditional surrender at the expense of the U.S., and, at worst, calculated to buy Putin time as his military is bogged down in a war of attrition.

Now we are seeing China’s real intentions. Beijing increasingly views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a useful proxy war against the U.S...

Beijing’s participation in Putin’s war was indirect at first, coming in the form of cheap oil and gas purchases and then dual use technologies.

Now, Xi is dropping the pretense. Last week in Brussels, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said the quiet part out loud. During a private conversation with Kaja Kallas, he made clear that “Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine as this could allow the United States to turn its full attention to China.”

Then, on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky brought receipts. Ukraine’s Security Service, sifting through the wreckage of Putin’s massive July 4 attack on Kyiv, found evidence that five Chinese companies were directly supplying key components of the Russian-built version of the Iranian Shahed 136/131 drone.

Ukraine immediately imposed economic sanctions on the five Chinese companies whose stamped parts were found in the drones — Central Asia Silk Road International Trade, Suzhou Ecod Precision Manufacturing, Shenzhen Royo Technology, Shenzhen Jinduobang Technology, and Ningbo BLIN Machinery.

Since the beginning of the war in February 2022, Beijing has taken an official stance of neutrality. In reality, however, Xi is fully colluding with Putin.

We have long warned of this growing ideological war that Russia and China alongside their Axis of Evil partners — Iran and North Korea — are waging against Washington and Brussels. It is increasingly kinetic and fast becoming global in nature.

Putin’s use of Chechen troops was its first indicator. Then his support of Oct. 7. to cover his counteroffensive in Avdiivka. Then North Korean soldiers, and now reportedly 50 Laotian engineers. Beijing is a key investor in Laos, including the China-Laos Economic Corridor and the China-Laos Railway.

Now Beijing’s role is increasingly in the open. Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, connected all of these dots in an interview with The New York Times.

Rutte warned: “If Xi Jinping would attack Taiwan, he would first make sure that he makes a call to his very junior partner in all of this, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, residing in Moscow, and telling him, ‘Hey, I’m going to do this, and I need you to keep them busy in Europe by attacking NATO territory.”

In that context, it is easy to see how China now views Putin’s war against Ukraine as its own proxy war against the U.S. The connective tissue between Ukraine and Taiwan is very real and their fates intertwined.

If the West loses in Ukraine, Xi gets a win, because Putin then would be freed to use his rebuilt military against NATO. If Putin is defeated in Ukraine, then Team Trump could inflict a serious loss upon Xi — and go a long way in deterring Beijing in Taiwan and elsewhere across the Indo-Pacific...

Xi’s proxy war against Trump in Ukraine is only Beijing’s opening act. If we are to win this second cold war, then ensuring Putin’s defeat in Ukraine must become a strategic end state for the White House. The two conflicts are indeed connected...

China’s proxy war against the U.S. in Ukraine is just getting started. Team Trump winning in Ukraine is now a national imperative and it requires an “all-in” approach."