OPINION — Vladimir V. Putin was re-elected in a sham election, giving him another six years in his twenty-five-year reign of power. There was no independent media coverage or meaningful opposition to Putin in a victory that comes on the heels of the death of political opposition leaders Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony. And as the war in Ukraine enters its third year, Putin, comparing himself to Peter the Great, is continuing in pursuing his goal of recreating the Russian Empire.
To understand what may come next, we need to understand Russia’s history. In 1979, an expansionist Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the beginning of a 10-year bloody war with enormous casualties. In November 1986, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev made the decision to withdraw all Soviet combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 1988, publicly stating that Afghanistan had become “a bleeding wound.” And by February 1989, all Soviet troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.
What followed was a failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, with Ukraine and Belarus declaring independence and the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland – seeking international recognition as sovereign states. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, with Boris Yeltsin taking over as president of a Russian state that was no longer a communist monolith. This was the end of the Cold War.
In 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned and passed the torch to Putin who told the nation in 2005, that the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
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The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan was welcomed by many in China who remembered the summer of 1969, when the Soviet Union had 42 divisions – over one million troops – on the border with China, threatening a nuclear strike against Chinese nuclear facilities. Indeed, that March, Chinese and Soviet forces clashed on Zhenbao Island on the Ussuri River, with both sides taking casualties. The conflict ended in two weeks, averting an escalation of hostilities with the potential use of nuclear weapons.
What followed was the speed with which China and the U.S. normalized relations. China’s Chairman Mao Zedong reached out to the U.S., convinced that enlisting a far-away enemy against a nearby enemy was the best strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. Mao invited President Richard Nixon, who also distrusted the Soviet Union, to China, and in February 1972, during Nixon’s visit to China, both China and the U.S. agreed to a Shanghai Communique that committed the U.S. and China to work toward the normalization of relations.
On January 1, 1979, formal diplomatic relations were established, with Deng Xiaoping, who replaced Mao as China’s paramount leader in 1978, agreeing to expand cooperation with the U.S. in collecting and sharing intelligence on the Soviet Union. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Stansfield Turner visited China in July 1981 to further discuss the Soviet’s December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Bill Casey replaced Turner as the DCI and, working with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and President Reagan’s National Security Adviser, William Clark, collaborated to defeat the Soviet Union in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan.
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And they were successful. Much of the success in Afghanistan, to defeat the Soviet Union’s invading forces, was due to China’s participation. Starting in 1982, China cooperated with the U.S. to provide weapons to the Mujahideen and training in China for their resistance fighters. The amount and quality of arms and ammunition China provided increased exponentially from 1985 to 1988, to nearly $1.5 billion, contributing significantly to the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
China’s distrust of the Soviet Union and their partnership with the U.S. to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan – a prelude to the demise of the Soviet empire and end of the Cold War — is in sharp relief to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s embrace of a revanchist Russian Federation and its dictator, Vladimir V. Putin.
During the Winter Olympics in China in 2022, President Xi spoke of a “no limits” partnership with Putin days before Russia invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation that Russia had provided security assurances to in 1994, in the Budapest Memorandum, also signed by the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
This “no limits” partnership must be of concern to many in China who continue to view Russia with suspicion and are concerned that China aligning with a revanchist Russia will affect China’s international credibility, not only with the U.S. and the European Union, but with the Global South and others who view Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a blatant war of aggression.
This piece by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joe Detrani was first published in The Washington Times
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