Are China and Russia building an Eastern NATO?

Russia’s Tsentr-2026 exercise in Chelyabinsk region in west-central Russia, offered a glimpse of a changing Eurasian security landscape. Chinese troops trained alongside forces from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Mongolia, while exercises by the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization ran in parallel. Unmanned systems featured prominently, including drones already shaped by Russia’s experience in Ukraine. Fifty-five countries sent delegations to observe.

It would be easy to read this as another step toward an anti-Western military bloc. A more consequential development is taking shape: an increasingly dense military-learning network centred on China and Russia but extending well beyond them.

Its roots predate the February 2022 Ukraine war. China joined Russia’s Vostok strategic exercise in 2018, followed by Tsentr-2019, Kavkaz-2020 and Vostok-2022. Russian forces then joined China’s Zapad Interaction-2021 exercise, including mixed command arrangements. Other formats have proliferated: China-Russia-Iran naval exercises, China-Russia-South Africa drills, China-Belarus airborne training, China-Russia-Mongolia border exercises, joint bomber and naval patrols, and increasingly sophisticated bilateral training.

Turning combat experience into training

The Ukraine war has given this network a new function. Russia now possesses something China lacks: recent experience of prolonged, high-intensity warfare. Its forces have accumulated lessons in electronic warfare, drone-artillery integration, dispersed operations, logistics under persistent surveillance and rapid adaptation to cheap unmanned systems.

China provides a different comparative advantage. It has the world’s deepest commercial drone ecosystem, enormous electronics and manufacturing capacity, increasingly sophisticated unmanned platforms, simulation technologies and a military training system capable of absorbing and standardising technical knowledge. Russia can generate battlefield lessons; China has greater capacity to industrialise and scale technologies around them.

Righting Eurasia’s imbalance

Third countries entering the same training environment gain exposure to both. That matters because Eurasia suffers from an imbalance that military spending figures alone do not capture: an imbalance of military connectivity. NATO has 32 members, an integrated military command structure, permanent institutions, established procedures for force generation and decades of interoperability. The US complements this in Asia through treaty alliances and increasingly networked partnerships.

The security architecture across continental Eurasia is much thinner. China has no comparable alliance network. Russia has the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), but on a far smaller scale. Even the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) explicitly defines itself as a non-military bloc without supranational military command or joint armed forces.

The emerging China-Russia-plus network can therefore be understood as a form of network balancing. It reduces disparities in military connectivity without requiring an Eastern NATO.

In such an environment, extreme asymmetry can make coercion appear cheap. A state that believes its opponent lacks intelligence, drones, electronic warfare, logistics resilience or external partners may become more willing to use force. Wider diffusion of military knowledge can produce the opposite calculation. Smaller states need not match great powers platform for platform. They need enough defensive capacity to make rapid victory implausible.

Strengthening deterrence

Military learning can therefore strengthen deterrence through denial rather than dominance. It can also increase strategic autonomy. Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Pakistan and other states do not need to choose a single security patron if they can learn from Russian, Chinese, Western, Turkish or other partners simultaneously. More security providers can reduce dependence on any one of them and give smaller states greater room to manoeuvre.

Repeated military interaction may also create familiarity among states that remain political competitors. China and India, India and Pakistan, or Iran and Gulf states do not need strategic alignment to benefit from officers meeting, observing one another and understanding how other militaries operate. Such contacts cannot eliminate conflict, but they can reduce uncertainty and miscalculation.

Danger of the perception of camps

There is an obvious danger. A network that reassures its members can alarm outsiders. If China-Russia-plus evolves into an exclusive bloc organised against NATO and US allies, while Western security networks simultaneously harden against it, greater connectivity within each camp could produce greater instability between them.

The distinction between network balancing and bloc formation is therefore decisive. A stabilising Eurasian order would preserve overlapping relationships. Mongolia can train with China and Russia while maintaining ties with the US and Japan. India can participate in the SCO while remaining in the Quad. Gulf states can maintain Western security partnerships while engaging China, Russia and other BRICS members. Military transparency, observer participation and crisis communication should connect these networks rather than allow them to become sealed camps.

Eurasia does not need an Eastern NATO to balance a Western one. Nor is lasting stability likely to come from the military predominance of any single network. In a continent crowded with conflicts and flashpoints, peace may depend on preventing extreme asymmetries in capabilities, connectivity and vulnerability from making coercion look easy. The most stable balance may ultimately be one in which no state or bloc owns the network.

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