Are the recent Russian-Chinese naval drills a sign of deepening CRINK cooperation?
The Big Ask | No. 32.2025
On Sunday, 3rd August, Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began conducting a joint naval exercise in the Sea of Japan. Dubbed ‘Maritime Interaction 2025’, the drills included submarine rescue, anti-submarine warfare, air and missile defence, and maritime combat exercises, lasting until Tuesday, 5th August.
As two of the ‘CRINK’ nations – alongside Iran and North Korea – which present a challenge to the free and open international order, increasing cooperation between Russia and the PRC poses a concern to the United Kingdom (UK) and its allies and partners. Although the two nations have conducted joint naval patrols since 2012, they have more recently become increasingly aligned – especially since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. With Maritime Interaction 2025 in mind, for this week’s Big Ask, we asked six experts: Are the recent Russian-Chinese naval drills a sign of deepening CRINK cooperation?
British Defence Attaché to Ukraine (2008-2011) and Russia (2019-2022)
Russian-Chinese naval drills this week again jangled nerves in the Japanese Ministry of Defence, which reported in July that such exercises, bomber flights, joint ship deployments and airspace violations were of ‘grave concern’. The bilateral exercise in the Far East followed one with Iran in the Persian Gulf in March this year. Additionally, North Korea observed the Russian naval exercise Ocean-2024 last year, which also involved the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).
These drills are invariably modest, aimed at signalling common purpose rather than achieving practical benefit. Donald Trump, President of the United States (US), was right when he said he was ‘not at all concerned’ about shows of force by America’s adversaries, given existing load bearing partnerships and larger, more complex allied exercises in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions.
Beyond exercises, shared authoritarianism and common animosity towards the US, any purported ‘CRINK’ alliance remains speculative. The deepening of the Russian-Chinese partnership and Russia’s military-technical cooperation with Iran and North Korea is clear. But neither Russia nor the PRC rushed to Iran’s side during its brief conflict with Israel in June.
The PRC has been careful not to become directly associated with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia is similarly wary of becoming embroiled in the PRC’s Taiwan irredentism. And the ‘alliance’ remains lopsided; exercises expose the technical superiority of the Chinese military at the expense of its partners. The PRC should remain Britain’s main focus.
Director, Mayak Intelligence, and Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy
Beware the power of a neat acronym!
‘CRINK’, with its implications of some kind of unified axis, is a particularly troublesome one. Instead, the PRC, Russia, Iran and North Korea are as bound by mutual mistrusts and competing ambitions as common interests.
Russia has long been happy to exercise alongside the PRC, not least as they appreciate full well how much this worries adherents to the rules-based international order. When the PRC sent a contingent to Russia’s Vostok 2018 exercises, alarmist talk of a new alliance was belied by the way; not invited into the naval component of the war game, Beijing sent one of its Dongdiao class auxiliary general intelligence spy ships to take a snoop.
Now, Moscow is even more eager to play up the depth of cooperation, while Beijing wants to learn as much as it can from the experience of the conflict in Ukraine. Yet, even as the Kremlin publicly lauds the ‘friendship with no limits’, its security agencies are complaining about the heightened tempo of Chinese espionage. Russian armed forces continue to update contingency plans in case there is ever a cross-border incursion, and signs of increased nationalism in Beijing worry the Kremlin.
As Iran discovered, the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend – sometimes they’re just a conditional, transactional, and often temporary fellow traveller.
Member of the Advisory Board to the China Observatory, Council on Geostrategy
The PRC’s geoeconomic ties with Russia and other CRINK members (Iran and North Korea) are a pale reflection of the geopolitical, military and security bonds which they have forged. Their mutual economic interests are narrow, and even losing global traction.
Russian-Chinese trade accounted for almost 94% of the US$260 billion (£194 billion) of Chinese trade with CRINK nations in 2024; almost a rounding error in the PRC’s global trade of over US$6 trillion (£4.48 trillion). Russia, which now depends on the PRC for over a third of its trade, mostly provides the PRC with fossil fuels, while Iran – which sends almost all of its oil to the PRC – supplies the latter with about 15% of its oil needs.
With the rising fragmentation of world trade, investment and finance into blocs centred around the US and China, it is clear that while the CRINK, and countries aligned with them, account for about half of the global population and wield much voting power at the United Nations (UN), their economic heft is a small fraction of the much more resilient and lively trade, foreign investment and financial flows accounted for by the US and its allies and partners. The PRC’s own share of world output probably peaked in 2023, and despite its industrial prowess, its economy is otherwise troubled.
The US and other similarly aligned nations should capitalise on their relative economic strengths by becoming more disciplined and organised in opposition. If they do not, the inferior geoeconomic capacity of the CRINK may nevertheless offer the grouping some leverage.
Policy Fellow (China Observatory), Council on Geostrategy
While the joint drills are an indication of the budding closeness between Russia and the PRC, there remain points of contention between these two powers and the other members of the so-called ‘axis of evil’. Britain and other allies and partners should remember the areas of unease which exist among the four countries, to keep a sense of perspective around the strength of the alliance, but also to strategise for ways it can be curtailed.
The joint drills signal a willingness for Russia and the PRC to fight together against a common enemy, but to what extent is this a performative sign? Could it be that the drills serve each side’s independent interests, and not necessarily Russia’s certain military support in the case of a Taiwan contingency?
It is helpful to remember that Russia continues to resent its economic dependency on the PRC, in light of the sanctions imposed on its oil produce, and that competition between the two countries for leadership and influence remains in some of the former Soviet states such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Both Beijing and Moscow are vying for first dibs in the Arctic in relation to governance norms, even though they may cooperate on certain projects in the region, such as liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The CRINK are undoubtedly bound together by a desire to flout the rules-based international order to varying degrees. This is a strong sealant, but it cannot cover the cracks at the core of many of their interwoven relations.
Programme Director for Security Studies, Centre for Defence Strategies, and Joint Programme Leader, Future of Ukraine Programme, Centre for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge
The Russian-Chinese military exercises coincided with the inaugural joint naval drills between India and the Philippines, held from 3rd-5th August.
Beijing maintains separate territorial disputes with both nations. The Himalayan border conflict continues to strain bilateral relations with India, while the PRC’s claims over nearly the entire South China Sea have triggered persistent tensions and confrontations, most notably with the Philippines and Vietnam.
The drills should be linked to the important parallel potential aspects of US-Russia negotiations, and the promised sanctioning of Russia. Trump will only meet Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, if there is a genuine breakthrough, although the two leaders perceive the value of such a meeting differently. For Putin, it is clearly of greater importance.
Russia aims to isolate Ukraine in Europe, hence the idea of trilateral negotiations without European Union (EU) participation. This is a particularly negative scenario for Ukraine, which is an integral part of EU-US and EU-US-PRC negotiation frameworks. Putin believes negotiations should occur only when he can raise the stakes. His next ‘reference points’ for escalation are likely to be:
Potential occupation of another city in eastern Ukraine (or another significant development on the front);
Increased military pressure through exercises in Belarus; and
Prolonging the timeline until he can meet with Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, to seek verbal assurances.
Despite Putin’s likely attempt to delay proceedings, the pauses between escalation moves are shortening. However, this has not stopped Putin from raising the annexing of non-occupied territories as a core precondition for negotiations during conversations.
Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University
Are the recent Russian-Chinese naval drills a sign of deepening CRINK cooperation?
The answer is a highly qualified ‘yes’. Both Russia and the PRC have an interest in visible signs of unity against the free and open nations as a part of demonstrating the increasingly multipolar world they desire. But both countries also have reservations about their ‘no limits’ partnership.
For the PRC, the relationship remains transactional. A sanctioned Russia has significantly increased exports of raw materials to the PRC, and increased imports of machinery and electronics which are hard to produce in its war economy. The PRC may also be looking into the medium term, where the publics of free and open nations are losing resolve to support the expense of bolstering Ukraine, thinking that this war exhaustion may transfer to any Chinese moves against Taiwan.
For Russia, the increasing sanctions since 2014 have resulted in a pivot towards Asia. Southeast Asia in particular has become an important market for Russian energy and defence technology (though less so since 2022). These moves have caused some tensions between Moscow and Beijing. Thus, naval exercises and displays of unity may be a way to mitigate these tensions.
Ultimately, Russia is weaker in the Indo-Pacific than the PRC. Its choice is either to be the weaker partner to the PRC, or risk being forced out of the region entirely.
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