Russia’s «pivot to the East» began long before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the outset, Moscow conceived it as a strategic signal to the West: Kremlin had an alternative to partnership with the developed democracies.
It is no coincidence that the turning point in relations with China came in 2005. That year Russia transferred small tracts of land in the Far East to the PRC, completing the border demarcation process; conducted its first joint military exercises with Beijing; and joined China in demanding that the United States withdraw its military bases from Central Asia. By then Moscow had already fallen out not only with Washington after the American invasion of Iraq but also with its European partners in the aftermath of Ukraine’s so-called Orange Revolution.
The partnership has proved remarkably resilient. It has survived multiple stresses, and Russia’s war against Ukraine has, if anything, only strengthened it—by stripping Moscow of virtually all its former partners. Today it can be stated with confidence that, in economic terms, the «pivot to the East» has been accomplished. Russia has ceased to be Europe’s raw-materials appendage and consumer of its industrial goods and has become instead China’s raw-materials appendage and importer of its high-technology products. The transformation is not prospective; it has already occurred.
This claim is not sensational. Yet two key points deserve emphasis.
The first concerns the nature of Russia’s dependence on China. Discussions of the subject usually focus on the fact that the PRC has long and firmly replaced Europe as the chief buyer of Russian commodities. That is beyond dispute. In 2025, 42.3 percent of Russia’s exported crude oil, 33.7 percent of pipeline gas, 31.3 percent of LNG, 41.2 percent of thermal coal, 60.2 percent of sawn timber and nearly 22 percent of agricultural produce went to China. Beijing’s share of total Russian exports reached 29.8 percent—close to the levels recorded for the EU in 2003−2005.
Although overall bilateral trade turnover fell 6.9 percent last year from the 2024 record, new peaks are clearly in sight. High oil prices and, apparently, rising Chinese deliveries of dual-use items pushed turnover up 19.7 percent year-on-year in the first four months of 2026 (Russian exports rose 17 percent, imports from China 23.1 percent).
After the outbreak of full-scale war, exports to China became a genuine lifeline for the Russian economy. It should be noted, however, that Moscow’s trade policy has shown considerable diversification. Oil shipments to India, for instance, increased by 83.2 million tons between 2021 and 2025—four times the growth recorded on the Chinese route. Brazil, not China, is the largest buyer of Russian mineral fertilizers. Gas exports to China rose from 15.5 billion cubic meters in 2022 to 38.8 billion in 2025, but the figure is now likely to plateau because the Power of Siberia pipeline has reached full capacity. What matters far more is that Russia’s much-discussed «economic vassalage» is taking shape not around export dependence but around import dependence.
In 2021 China supplied 22.3 percent of Russia’s imported goods while the EU, UK and Switzerland together accounted for more than 34.2 percent (the gap was even wider in 2013: 16.9 percent versus 42.6 percent). By the end of 2025 the picture had reversed: China’s share stood at 37 percent against 12.7 percent for the Europeans. More importantly, China has become the sole and irreplaceable supplier of high-technology goods. Chinese equipment now accounts for nearly 100 percent of the Russian market for mobile-signal transmission gear, about 90 percent of smartphones, and 60−70 percent of personal computers and automobiles. Virtually all microprocessors and chips used in Russian industry—including the defense sector—arrive from China or via China.
Dozens of cases have come to light in which «Russian» processors and other «high-tech» items funded lavishly under import-substitution programs turned out to be inexpensive Chinese products bearing hastily applied labels of fictitious Russian manufacturers. Reports of Chinese deliveries of dual-use items—from microelectronic components and drone engines to nitrocellulose—are constant; a large share is used directly in the war against Ukraine. According to some estimates, up to 90 percent of all industrial equipment entering Russia during the war years is also of Chinese origin.
This matters. Oil and petroleum products can be sold to many countries (Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and South Korea only began buying them from Russia in 2026), but high-technology imports now come exclusively from the PRC.
Since 2023 China has also become the principal conduit between the Russian and global economies. Foreign-trade transactions no longer route through Western banks; the yuan has been officially designated the only currency in which Russia’s reserve fund accumulates holdings. From the other side of the ledger, the Bank of Russia is now the world’s largest foreign holder of yuan reserves, accounting for at least one-third of global yuan holdings. By late 2025 Beijing had also emerged as a buyer of Russian gold caught under Western sanctions, lifting monthly purchases to $ 1 billion.
Economic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is distinguished by a degree of flexibility almost unimaginable in Russia’s dealings with any other country. This goes beyond sanctions evasion. The two sides have constructed a unique payments system that permits «mirror» transactions in which funds never cross borders and export-import flows become virtually untraceable. Beijing has shown itself willing to falsify product classifications in its statistics, effectively ignoring the contraband character of much of the bilateral trade.
These arrangements make Russia’s dependence on China exceptionally durable. Any serious deterioration in relations would confront Moscow with the prospect of outright technological collapse.
At the same time, China has not replaced Europe for Russia. The most obvious reason is the near-total absence of direct Chinese investment. On the eve of the war European companies had accumulated more than $ 320 billion in Russian assets. This is not a matter of Beijing’s mistrust of Moscow. As an industrial power that spent decades pursuing catch-up development, China has consistently preferred to invest in extractive industries, real-estate development, infrastructure (ports, roads, airports) and, to a lesser extent, banking and finance—plus companies that could serve as sources of new technology, especially in Europe.
That investment model makes major Chinese commitments in Russia almost impossible. The country has no promising technology firms, its largest resource deposits are closed to majority foreign ownership, infrastructure is state property, and where large companies control it, construction serves primarily as a vehicle for budget «siphoning”—which is why Russian pipelines and roads remain the most expensive in the world. Consequently, even during the war Chinese investment has not grown and credit cooperation has never materialized.
China, in short, is helping Moscow survive, not develop. That reality only magnifies Beijing’s leverage over the Kremlin. Tellingly, the share of raw materials in Russian exports to China today is even higher than it was in exports to the EU in 2021. Moscow therefore enjoys a relatively high degree of political autonomy from Beijing—the Chinese side does not dictate Russia’s foreign or domestic agenda—while remaining acutely aware of its profound economic and technological dependence.
Beijing, for its part, supports Russia because the present arrangement suits it, as does any plausible outcome of the war launched by the Kremlin. China has extracted substantial economic concessions (Russian gas, for example, is sold on the Chinese market at roughly 1.5 times below the price the EU pays for American supplies). Formally neutral in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Beijing nevertheless gains valuable battlefield data by meticulously studying the performance of Russian forces. This is especially useful because the Chinese military was built for decades on Soviet models; analyzing Russian weaknesses helps it modernize its own armed forces. Beijing is also closely examining Western responses to Russian aggression with an eye to «trying them on for size.»
In effect, Russia serves China as a minesweeper—absorbing the shocks and missteps of the pioneer so that Beijing can learn from the Kremlin’s mistakes. It also functions as a useful destroyer of the old world order, a role China welcomes but prefers not to play at the expense of its own economic well-being. For these reasons China will, all else being equal, remain Moscow’s ally. Although many Russian analysts worry about potential Chinese territorial claims (historical grievances cannot be dismissed, especially when the Kremlin itself invokes similar logic elsewhere), such a threat does not look realistic in the foreseeable future. Russian resources and potential are so readily available to Beijing that coercion would be both counterproductive and expensive.
The absence of immediate territorial claims, however, should not obscure the larger historical trend: the emergence of a Sino-centric world. Recent visits to Beijing by Presidents Trump and Putin have only confirmed that China fully understands the scale and momentum of its ascent. In the 1950s it modeled itself on the Soviet Union; from the late 1990s it set out to catch up with the United States. Today the PRC is a power whose policies and economy no one else can meaningfully influence.
Unlike Putin, who merely believes that time is on his side, Xi Jinping has no reason to doubt it. Trump’s tariff war produced no significant Chinese concessions; exports to the United States now constitute just 6.2 percent of China’s total. Beijing also controls critical elements of the modern high-tech economy—rare-earth metals above all—to a degree that OPEC never achieved with oil. It is prepared to deal with Washington on equal terms, provided the West does not mobilize against its new primary rival.
As for Russia, Xi—who speaks of a future bipolar world in order not to alarm the Americans or reveal the true extent of his ambitions—has little interest in Putin’s fantasies of «three centers of power» comprising the United States, China and Russia. The Kremlin leader was received with due ceremony in Beijing, yet no agreement was reached to expand cooperation around Russia’s «national treasure.» The most likely reason is Beijing’s skepticism about long-term gas purchases at a time when China is rapidly shifting toward green energy. In essence, Russia was offered the chance to sell raw materials at cost, with the clear understanding that future demand will only decline. Moscow may well accept the terms. Strategic partnership with China now looks like the only option available to a country undergoing structural economic decay and the total loss of its former technological partners.
