How China Is Using the Ukraine War to Set the Stage for Taiwan

By: Michael Kuiken and Randy Schriver | Taipei Times |

For two nights at the beginning of June, Russia sent more than 650 drones and over 70 missiles into Ukraine, killing 23 people and bringing down apartment blocks in Kyiv and Dnipro. By drone count, it was one of the largest Russian attacks of the war.

Examining the wreckage, one can find the same story in every fuselage. The flight controller, the optics, the engine, and the carbon-fiber skin are all of Chinese origin. It may have been bolted together in Russia, but its parts were manufactured in Shenzhen and Xiamen.

The man who arms Russian President Vladimir Putin, we are told, just sent him home empty-handed. That was the read on Beijing last month after President Putin arrived with a thin agenda and left without a Siberian pipeline. Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly told US President Donald Trump that Putin “may regret” the whole adventure. But in Brussels last July, officials briefed on a closed-door meeting say that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the EU Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas the reverse: Beijing cannot accept a Russian defeat, because it would free Washington to turn its whole focus on China.

Read the full article on The National Interest.