China hails military ties with Russia, fueling concerns over Ukraine

China is willing to “further improve strategic communication and strengthen multilateral coordination and cooperation to make new contributions to stability and security in the region and globally,” Chinese state media on Monday reported Li as saying.

Li’s trip follows similar visits to the Russian capital by top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi and Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, in which the Chinese officials have consistently voiced strong support for Putin and signaled shared displeasure with the United States.

Such displays of camaraderie have intensified concern that China is ready to provide lethal aid for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. China’s Central Military Commission has told Russia that it is willing to send a secret, “incremental” provision of weapons to the war effort, according to a leaked internal Pentagon assessment based on U.S. eavesdropping on Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

Li’s Moscow visit, his first overseas trip since being appointed in March, was “dignified and aboveboard” and merely a “barometer” of the strength of bilateral relations, said the Global Times, a nationalist, state-affiliated Chinese tabloid.

The newspaper accused Western media of hyping up the visit by connecting it to the war in Ukraine. “China has no obligation to repeatedly ‘prove its innocence,’ and no one has the right to force us to do so,” it said in an editorial on Sunday.

China maintains that it is a neutral party in the conflict. In an effort to present itself as an honest broker in the war, ahead of Xi’s visit to Moscow, Beijing announced a 12-point plan for reaching a political settlement and ending the conflict. But that proposal, which mostly rehashed old talking points, was largely dismissed in the United States and Europe.

Close observers of Chinese politics debate the extent to which Beijing is willing to risk Western sanctions by overtly supporting the war, but most agree that the war has only strengthened the close political alignment between the two regimes.

Russia says China agreed to secretly provide weapons, leaked documents show

That effort to band together against a perceived threat from the United States and its allies has injected momentum across almost all aspects of the relationship.

Trade volumes, for example, have surged to record highs as China takes advantage of cheap Russian oil and gas, while Russian consumers turn to Chinese electronics, cars and household appliances as Western alternatives become increasingly scarce.

Although both sides deny they have a traditional military alliance, joint drills between Chinese and Russia troops have becoming larger and more frequent, moving from small-scale ground exercises mostly in Central Asia to aerial patrols and naval drills held far from Chinese shores.

Putin told Li that he hoped for more joint training exercises and professional exchanges, reflecting the important position military-to-military cooperation holds in the relationship, according to Chinese state media.