According to a Financial Times (FT) report on Monday, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping told the visiting President Donald Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin might come to regret invading Ukraine.
This seemingly anodyne observation would be significant because China has refused to denounce the Russian attack on Ukraine and, while the Chinese insist they have not supported the invasion directly, they have undeniably protected Russia against the worst effects of international sanctions for its act of blatant aggression.
Xi is Putin’s senior partner in the Axis of Tyranny and if he truly thinks Putin made a terrible blunder by attacking Ukraine — even if he only revealed that opinion in a private chat with the visiting U.S. president — it could have a significant impact on Moscow’s determination to continue the stalemated war after four years of bloodshed and soaring expenses.
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The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday offered a brief and irritated denial of the FT report, calling it “completely false.”
President Trump also denied the report, insisting that Xi “never said that,” while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed to China’s denial of the account as the last word on the subject. FT dutifully reprinted these denials, but seemingly stood by its story, which was sourced to “several people familiar with the U.S. assessment of the Beijing summit.”
On Tuesday, Reuters put another dent in China’s claims of neutrality on Ukraine by revealing that roughly 200 Russian troops attended secret training exercises in China in late 2025, with a focus on drone warfare tactics, and some of the Russians returned to the Ukrainian battlefield with their new knowledge.
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Some of the Russians who received this Chinese training were themselves high-ranking professional military instructors, according to the report, so they could be expected to pass their knowledge along to Russia’s frontline forces in Ukraine.
The training program was outlined in a “dual-language Russian-Chinese agreement signed by senior Russian and Chinese officers in Beijing on July 2, 2025.” The agreement named several locations where the secret training would take place, including facilities located in China’s capital of Beijing, and also provided for Chinese troops to receive training in Russia.
Russian servicemen attend the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Saturday, May 9, 2026, during celebrations of the 81st anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany during the World War II. (Shamil Zhumatov/Pool Photo via AP)
Reuters was able to corroborate this document with internal Russian military reports from late 2025 that described Russian military personnel training in China. These Russian reports described the trainees studying Chinese drone warfare tactics, including the use of drones to pinpoint targets for mortar and artillery fire, and the deployment of electronic warfare weapons to shut down enemy drones.
One of the Russian military files reviewed by Reuters included photos of uniformed Russian soldiers sitting in classes taught by uniformed Chinese military instructors, which would rubbish China’s usual claims that any coincidental military collaboration with Russia during the Ukraine war was purely a matter of private companies working together voluntarily.
Previous reports have suggested China helped Russia improve its drone technology. The Chinese government claimed this collaboration was between private arms companies and was not directed by the regime in Beijing.
“By training Russian military personnel at an operational and tactical level who then participate in Ukraine, China is far more directly involved in the war on the European continent than previously known,” an unnamed intelligence official told Reuters.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not bluntly deny the report, as it did with the claim of Xi thinking Putin made a mistake in Ukraine. Instead, it repeated some boilerplate rhetoric about China’s “objective and impartial stance” on the Ukraine conflict.