WASHINGTON DC – Russia’s war machine in Ukraine, now in its fourth year, is surviving on a precarious lifeline of components and funds provided by a controversial alliance with Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang. If that support dried up, the prognosis is dire, with Atlantic Council experts’ assessment being brutally blunt: Russia’s military effort would look like “garbage.”
This stark geopolitical reality was the focus of an event hosted by the Washington-based think tank’s Eurasia Center on Thursday, which launched a new report, “The CRINK: Inside the new bloc supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine.”
Author Angela Stent, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, detailed the alignment among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, noting that this group, though sometimes referred to as an axis, is a “set of intensifying bilateral ties... essential for Russia’s continued prosecution of the war.”
Stent warned that the CRINK members are increasingly constituting an “anti-US bloc” united not by shared values, but by “shared grievances.”
These authoritarian states, she added, are essential allies in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan for what he calls a “post-West world, a global order.”
Moscow’s dependency
The most striking assessment came during the expert panel. When asked what Russia’s military operation would look like without the CRINK partners, Debra Cagan, senior advisor at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, did not mince words.
“It would look like garbage,” she stated, explaining the fundamental dependence. “Russia needs computer chips. They need special metals, rare earth minerals, to continue to have their defense lines running, and they would not be able to do that, especially without China on most of these major pieces of equipment,” she explained.
This underscores the critical reality revealed in the report: Russia, stripped of Western technology and investment by sanctions, is wholly dependent on foreign inputs to continue manufacturing missiles, drones, tanks, and other high-tech weaponry.
Untrustworthy enablers
While Iran and North Korea provide direct battlefield consumables (drones and artillery shells, respectively), China is portrayed as Russia’s indispensable – yet highly asymmetrical – economic and technological pillar.
The report highlights that China has become Russia’s economic lifeline, with bilateral trade surging to record highs since the 2022 invasion.
Crucially, the US estimates that China is providing nearly 80% of the dual-use items Russia needs to sustain the war. This includes everything from consumer electronics used in advanced weaponry to high-end machine tools and, most critically, microelectronics.
But this relationship is not one of equals; it is highly skewed. Russia, a desperate customer exchanging raw materials for manufactured goods, is the junior partner. China’s trade with Russia accounts for only about 3% of its total global trade, while Russia is now profoundly reliant on China.
“China is Russia’s essential partner in seeking to challenge US and Western interests around the world and undermine the current international order,” notes the CRINK report.
Expert warning: Don’t trust China
This asymmetry is the root of the “don’t trust China” warning that permeated the launch event. Experts emphasized that Beijing’s calculus is purely pragmatic.
If the political or economic costs of supporting Moscow rise too high—for instance, due to secondary sanctions from the West—China retains the full flexibility to reduce or completely cut off support. Russia, by contrast, is locked in.
This dynamic means China could effectively hold the key to ending the war in Ukraine, but not out of principle. Instead, it is a cold, hard strategic asset Beijing is using to gain leverage against the West and solidify its control over its newly dependent partner.
Angela Stent was unambiguous about the scale of the challenge: “I do believe that these countries do represent a growing threat to the West, both individually and collectively. And I think responding to these dangers will be difficult, and it will be quite costly,” she said.
Crucially, Stent dismissed hopes of an easy split between Moscow and Beijing, stating, “driving wedges between them... is unlikely to work in the short term.”
The message to Washington and NATO is clear: The CRINK bloc, while fractured, poses a singular, unprecedented threat that demands a strategic response.
Stent’s final policy bottom line: “The US does need to devise a consistent, targeted strategy of seeking to exploit the points of tension between the two countries, however difficult that is.”