As Russia runs out of tanks, will China’s military take a hit?
- Russia is struggling to replace frontline military equipment lost in its war in Ukraine
- But China, its second-biggest arms buyer, has reduced dependency in recent years
It has now pulled decades-old T-62M tanks from storage for new battalions to be sent to Ukraine, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in a daily update last week. The tanks, which entered Soviet service in 1983, were also photographed loaded on trains at a location verified to be the railway station of Russian-controlled Melitopol in southeastern Ukraine.
But while Russia is facing difficulties in replacing frontline military equipment and producing new arms, it may not have much of a knock-on effect on its second-largest weapons buyer: China. Analysts say the growing autarky of China’s military-industrial complex has minimised any impact of the Ukraine war on Chinese arms production.
China had imported mainly jet propulsion systems and surface-to-air missiles from Russia, but it has been actively developing its own versions of imports, said Richard Bitzinger, a visiting senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, China bought destroyers, Kilo-class attack submarines and Ilyushin Il-76 transport aircraft, he said.
“But in every one of these cases, the Chinese have started to develop Chinese counterparts, Chinese competitors, and then essentially and slowly been reducing their dependencies,” Bitzinger said.