Russia and China wound up joint war games off the Pacific coast last week, the first joint military venture in a rapidly growing partnership that some experts see rearranging Asian strategic realities.
The eight-day manoeuvres, which involved Russian strategic bombers, naval units and almost 10,000 troops from the two sides, have been widely viewed as a Chinese triumph. Moscow's show of might appeared to support Beijing's idea of how any future crisis over Taiwan ought to be settled.
But the presence of military observers from the six-member Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) - Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan - suggests the war games might also have been aimed at a problem nearer to Moscow's heart: the deteriorating situation in former Soviet Central Asia.
Some analysts believe Moscow and Beijing hope to transform the SCO, hitherto a Central Asian talking shop, into a Nato-style security alliance to keep order in their increasingly troubled neighbourhood. 'Shared security concerns in the Far East and Central Asia are driving Russia and China into much closer security co-operation,' says Sergei Lusyanin, an expert with the official Institute of International Relations, which trains Russian diplomats.
'It's not surprising to see them flexing a bit of joint military muscle for the first time, and I think we can expect much more of that in future.'
At an early July Kremlin summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Hu Jintao pledged to work together to prepare their armed forces 'to deal with new challenges and threats'. These were listed as extremism, terrorism and separatism.