The Russian Secret Service FSB considers China to be an enemy with territorial claims
Every partnership has a boundary.
Moscow. Officially Mask It reports cooperation with China. Unofficial Moscow considers Beijing to be an enemy who floats territorial claims to the Russian Far East. He said it The New York Times (NYT), referring to the leaked document of the Russian FSB secret service.
The document was obtained by the Ares Leaks hacker group, but it did not indicate how she did so. This prevents the definitive verification of the authenticity of the material, but NYT showed the report to six Western news services, and they all evaluated it as authentic. The document has so far provides the most detailed view behind the scenes of Russian counter -intelligence against China.
Orosable unshakable relationships?
President Vladimir Putin In public, it describes relations with China as unshakable and entering the « golden era », recalls the American letter. Inside the FSB, however, according to NYT, there is a secret unit that perceives China as a threat and warns against spying and attempts to obtain Russian military technologies or recruit dissatisfied Russian scientists.
The unit claims that China follows Russian operations at Ukraine In order to gain maximum knowledge of Western weapons, it prepares the land for possible territorial claims in the Far East, gaining influence in Central Asia and the Arctic performs spying under the apron of mining and research. According to NYT, these concerns summarize the internal eight -page FSB document from the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024.
Since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has established deeper cooperation with China, which changed the global balance of power. According to NYT, a rapidly expanding partnership is one of the most unprepraedly relationships in modern geopolitics, but at the same time it can have extensive impacts.
China
Despite Western sanctions, the Russian economy did not collapse after the invasion, as many predicted. China is largely due to this. It is the largest customer of Russian oil and delivers key technologies such as chips, software and military components. When western companies withdrew from the country, they were replaced by Chinese brands. Moscow and Beijing are planning cooperation in many areas, from the film to the construction of a lunar base. The leaders of Putin and Si Jin-Pching talk about the partnership « without borders ».
However, according to the daily, the FSB secret document shows that it has a border partnership. Russian services perceive China as a risk and warn against its spying and the effort to acquire Russian technologies and influence. According to the report, China used the weakening of the Russian security forces as a result of the invasion of Ukraine and increased the efforts to verb Russian officials, experts, journalists and entrepreneurs close to the regime.
According to the report, there is a « tense and dynamically developing » spy duel between Russia and China. Three days before Russian invasion At Ukraine in February 2022, the FSB approved a new counterintelligent operation called « Entente-4 » aimed at revealing Chinese spying. The FSB ordered its agents to prevent strategically important information from leaking and personally warning citizens working with Beijing. It also ordered to follow the users of the Chinese Chat application WeChat.
Concerns about cooperation
The possible long -term alliance of two authoritarian regimes, Russia and China, with a total population of nearly 1.6 billion people and approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads, raises concerns in Washington. Some members of the President’s administration Donald Trump According to NYT, they believe that by making contact with Putin, the US can weaken Russian ties to China and prevent a scenario when « two nuclear powers would stand against the United States » as warned by Foreign Minister Marco Rubio.
According to NYT, the FSB document can strengthen the theory that Russia can be detached from China with an appropriate approach. It describes mutual distrust – for example, that China also uses lie detectors for its agents after returning home, strictly watching 20,000 Russian students and trying to recruit Russians with Chinese partners as spies. On the other hand, the fact that Putin is clearly aware of these risks and yet deepens relations with China may indicate that the United States has a little chance to influence the Russian direction.
Concerns about the growing dependence of Russia from the increasingly stronger Beijing dominate the whole report. However, it is not clear what these concerns are widespread in the wider Russian leadership outside the counter -intelligence. Finally, the Allied States usually spy on each other.
