China sent troops to Belarus for a training exercise for the first time on Monday, conducting an exercise called “Eagle Assault” near the Polish border that simulated capturing an airport.
The joint air and ground exercise was “seen by experts as a response to NATO’s growing interest in the Asia-Pacific region and a signal that China’s involvement in Europe will continue to grow,” as Voice of America News (VOA) put it.
The timing of the ostensible “anti-terrorism exercise” was fairly obvious, as it began just days after North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders issued a statement describing China’s growing alliance with Russia as a matter of “profound concern.”
Belarus, already firmly in Russia’s orbit, is cultivating closer ties with China after joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a security association that Beijing and Moscow touted as an Eastern-led alternative to NATO. Belarus became the first nominally European member of the SCO on July 4.
The Chinese Defense Ministry on Thursday published a glowing account of the Eagle Assault exercise, which began on Monday and ran throughout the week. According to the summary, Chinese and Belarusian troops demonstrated “good technical and tactical skills, solid training levels, and a strong fighting spirit.”
China praised the “seamless coordination” and “high level of trust” between Chinese and Belarusian forces during the exercise.
China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday reported the conclusion of joint Chinese-Russian live-fire naval exercises off the southern coast of China.
The six-day drill was billed as practice for dealing with “maritime security threats,” particularly by intercepting high-speed anti-ship missiles. Both Chinese and Russian ships were reportedly able to intercept simulated inbound missiles.
The seven participating warships also made time for “friendly exchanges including tai chi practices, sports competitions and deck receptions.”
The Global Times sneeringly dismissed Western concerns that naval cooperation between China and Russia was cause for concern, given China’s territorial aggression in the South China Sea.
“Chinese experts refuted such claims, saying that the Joint Sea series drills have been held multiple times since 2012 across many different waters near China and Russia, and while the exercise was combat-oriented, it did not set a third party as a target,” the Global Times argued, as though live-fire drills could only be alarming if the shooters loudly declare which adversary they are pretending to shoot at before pulling their triggers.
“Unlike the U.S. that aims to maintain its global military hegemony, The China-Russia military cooperation provides stabilizing factors to the deteriorating global and regional security, analysts noted,” the Chinese Communist paper huffed.
Given that China is currently using force to push the Filipinos out of their own territorial waters, and Russia is two years into its brutal invasion of Ukraine, “stabilizing” is not the word any rational analyst would use to describe either of them. Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko is not exactly a reassuring presence on the world stage, either.
China ran the Eagle Assault exercise once before, in 2018, but 2024’s iteration was much larger and much more clearly oriented toward teaching Chinese troops how to fight on European soil.
China has a long history of using military exercises to display its anger about international events, as can most obviously be seen in the exercises China keeps holding around Taiwan. Training on the ground with Belarus and at sea with Russia is a way for China to demonstrate that it thinks nothing of NATO complaints about its growing territorial aggression or inexcusable support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“On a broader level, an axis is in the making, where China and Russia are creating space for countries such as Iran, Belarus and North Korea to be heard,” the Diplomat suggested on Wednesday.
Defense24 thought Beijing enjoyed giving NATO a fresh headache by training with Lukashenko’s forces, sending a symbolic message that China is ready to make trouble on “NATO’s strategic eastern flank” if NATO “enters the space of activity of China’s strategic interests.”