plawolf
Lieutenant General
No, it would have been a massive strategic mistake to arm Russia too early.
China needs worthy partners, not a collection of useless hanger-ons and leaches like most of NATO.
If China started arming Russia early in the war, then there would not have been any incentive for Russia to rejuvenate its own decrepit arms industry or military establishment. Basically there would have been little to no reform and improvements by the Russians, they would have just carried on as before, and turned into a massive black hole for Chinese arms and money, and when they inevitably failed, they would have blamed that failure on China not being able to prove more arms and ammo instead of their own inability to learn and improve. Basically where America went wrong every time when it wanted to prop up puppet regimes world wide, and most recently as exemplified by Ukraine.
The other half of the equation is that China doesn’t want to show its hand too early. Overt, full spectrum support of Russia too early will just give the EU more time to boost their own military expansion programmes and squash all internal opposition to blindly following America.
Granted there’s little realistic prospect of the EU not slaving themselves to America, but you still shouldn’t gift it to the Americans on a silver platter. Better to make the Americans work for it, and in doing so cracking their whip hard on the European idiots and maybe beating some sense into some of the sheeple and create the prototype of popular resistance movements against their local American installed governors.
But by not sending Russia lethal support, China has bought four years already that Europe has been dithering instead of jumping fully into war economy prep. Even now, while their leaders harp lyrically about the need for arming up, there is so much internal resistance it’s almost impossible for them to do so properly or timely.
Russia is more than holding its own against Ukraine, that’s good enough for China.
The most important reason for China to stop short of sending lethal aid to Russia is that it basically checkmates America’s attempt to drag NATO into its wet dream of annexing Taiwan. If and when China is ready to move on Taiwan. The EU and NATO needs to STFU and sit in its corner or China will open the floodgates of arms shipments to Russia and unleash the Russian bear on them to rampage all across their garden just as their daddy America’s full might is needed in Asia and has no military might to spare for Europe.
