The chronicle of Russia sleepwalking into being China's client state

Russia annexing Crimea gave China not only economical but also geopolitical advantages. The West was anxious about both Putin's blatant expansionism and the disturbing Russian natural gas supplies due to the Crimea crisis. Few European countries had the luxury to care about China's stealthy aggression. It provided an opening for China to erode Hong Kong's autonomy with little international backfire.

In 2014, China cracked down on the Umbrella Movement which called for universal suffrage in Hong Kong. China denied Hong Kong's autonomy despite it being guaranteed by the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which had been registered as a treaty at the United Nations by both China's and the UK's governments. In June 2014, China claimed that the treaty was just a historical document that no longer had any significance.

Few countries cared about China's breach of the international treaty, as the world was busy dealing with Putin. At the 2014 G20 Brisbane summit, Western country leaders confronted Putin with threat of imposing further sanctions on Russia, while Xi was greeted by world leaders, including the then US president Barack Obama. The then UK prime minister David Cameron did not complain to Xi about China denying the Sino-British Joint Declaration. After the summit, Xi even delivered a speech at the Australian parliament.

In 2015, Russia's GDP fell 3.7% as the country was suffering from falling oil prices and international sanctions. Russia's reliance on China became irreversible.

Thanks to Russia, China once again got away with its aggression in 2016, when China rejected the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruling, which denied China 's claim of exercising exclusive control historically over the South China Sea. While China defied the rule based international order, the world's attention was drawn to Russia commiting war crimes in an aerial bombing campaign of opposition-controlled territory in Aleppo, Syria from September until October 2016.

In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in full scale. Putin needs China to fund the war. While the West is wondering whether China could help mediating, China is plotting to buy up Russian energy industries as Moscow desperately needs Chinese capital to undermine the international sanctions. As the war in Ukraine is prolonging, Putin seems to have not many choices except to allow the Chinese capital to dominate the Russian economy. For Xi, to secure energy resources from Russia, to dominate the Russian economy and to probably make Russia become China's client state are too tempting to refuse.

Although the war might hamstring some projects of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Ukraine, it is still in the interest of China expansionism regardless of how the war ends. If Ukraine falls into Moscow's hands, it would align with China's interest as long as Beijing manages to maintain the "no limits" China-Russia partnership. If the war drags Russia to be in trouble, Beijing would further secure the upper hand in its relationship with Moscow. China wants a weaker Russia to gain more control over their partnership, according to Alexander Gabuev, the chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center. For reasons above, Gabuev believed that Beijing would keep supporting Moscow even if China had high costs to pay for Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Asserting that the China-Russia partnership was not an equal one, Glaser told DW that China is a much stronger player in terms of its overall GDP," the Chinese technologies and innovation outstripped the Russian, and the Russian economy would decrease further as the war continued. Now, the prolonged war is upsetting Russian military and economic capacity. It provides China an opening to cement its influence over Russia,according to the former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Russia is fighting and exhausting itself while benefiting China. As China is going to be Putin's sole source of foreign financial support to fund his expansionism, the Russia-Ukraine war is becoming a proxy war under the context of the new cold war between China and the US with allies. Putin's invasion of Ukraine is the turning point where the proxy alignment between China and Russia materializes.

Cooking the proxy war, China is to control the Russian economy, gain political leverage by maintaining a pseudo-neutral position, to further secure the BRI trade routes, to exhaust and distract the West from blocking Beijing's way of seizing the South China Sea and Taiwan. China is pursuing its goal when Russia is sleepwalking Into being its client state. What the world needs to brace for next is the conflict between the two great powers, which are China and the US.