Donald Trump continues to ratchet up the pressure on Russia, in advance of a new deadline for Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire by the end of this week. The US is now imposing an additional 25 per cent tariff on India, as punishment for buying Russian oil. Trump has directly responded to dark warnings of nuclear war from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, repositioning two nuclear submarines to counter the threat. Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, was again in Moscow on Wednesday for talks with the Kremlin, and now the US and Russian presidents could meet as early as next week.

In other words, Trump is testing various tools to bring peace to Ukraine. Will any of them work? We shall soon find out. But there are now strong indications that his Art of the Deal with Russia could be derailed – by China.

What the president and his advisers perhaps haven’t factored into their Russia strategy is that China believes it is a winner from the war in Ukraine and is therefore highly motivated to continue its military assistance to Moscow. Just as the US and Europe are engaged in a proxy conflict with Russia by supplying military hardware and funding to Ukraine – in order to weaken the Russian military and economy, as former US defence secretary Lloyd Austin admitted in 2022 – China is waging its own proxy war against the US by propping up Moscow.

Having abstained from sending fully-assembled weapon systems to Russia, to avoid Washington’s ire, Beijing has been supplying Russia with dual use technology used to manufacture military hardware – all while maintaining a thin veil of deniability. These critical components include microelectronics, optics for tanks, satellite sensors, navigation equipment and the like and are sold by China to Russia overtly through state-owned enterprises or covertly via front companies, ostensibly for civilian use. In reality, they enhance Russia’s combat capabilities, enabling Moscow to fight a protracted war of attrition in Ukraine.

Of particular importance is China’s role as an enabler of Russia’s drone warfare campaign, a combat tactic that has been the hallmark of the war in Ukraine. Russia is believed to import millions of dollars worth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from China each year, in addition to producing UAVs jointly with Chinese firms inside Russia. Intelligence assessments suggest that Russia established a secret UAV factory in China through IEMZ Kupol, a subsidiary of Russian state-owned arms company Almaz-Antey, where engineers developed and flight-tested a new model of a long-range combat drone called Garpiya-3 (G3).

Helping to fuel the Russian wartime economy, China (along with India) has been a top importer of Russian oil, having accounted for 47 per cent of Russia’s crude oil exports in June 2025. Much of Russia’s oil exports are transported by a shadow fleet of unmarked tankers in order to bypass the sanctions regime.

Last week, Beijing rebuffed US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s threat of a 100 per cent tariff if it continues this practice. Further aligning itself with Moscow against the US, China has set out to increase gas imports from Russia, while cutting liquefied natural gas purchases from the US.

Why is China so invested in assisting Russia’s fight against Ukraine? Beijing’s rationale can be illustrated by the following Chinese allegory. “As two tigers are fighting ferociously in the valley, a sage monkey is sitting on top of the mountain, looking down and waiting to see how it will end.” Beijing sees itself as the wise monkey, waiting patiently as Moscow and Washington erode their respective combat arsenals.

Indeed, although China and Russia publicly portray themselves as allies, having declared a “no limits partnership” in 2022, they are in fact strategic opponents, linked in an opportunistic relationship aimed at achieving the common goal of limiting US and Western geopolitical dominance. China and Russia have had multiple border clashes during their turbulent history and to this day maintain a territorial dispute in Russia’s Far East. Demographically declining, Russia views decades-long migration of Chinese citizens into its Far East region as a grave threat. Putin warned as far back as 2000 that if Russia did not undertake the “real effort” to develop its Far East in the short term, then “a few decades from now its Russian population will mostly be speaking Japanese, Chinese, and Korean”.

China is incentivised to prolong the conflict in Ukraine by its desire to reduce the US weapons stockpile, which has already been depleted to dangerous levels as a result of US assistance to Ukraine and to Israel. China sees the erosion of American combat readiness as crucial in preventing the US from intervening in China’s future invasion of Taiwan, which some US military commanders assess as probable around 2027. For Beijing, fulfilling its “One China” grand plan by 2049 by securing control over Taiwan is likely to take priority over maintaining a transactional relationship and avoiding a trade war with Washington.

Thus far, Russia has largely brushed off President Trump’s various manoeuvres. Beijing, meanwhile, has been conducting joint Chinese-Russian naval exercises in the Sea of Japan. The signal from Moscow and Beijing to Washington is clear – peace in Ukraine is counter to both of their agendas.