WARSAW: China is holding military drills with Belarus this week at the eastern border of NATO, in a sign of rising tensions between Beijing and the US-led defence alliance.
The joint antiterrorist exercises on the soil of Belarus near the Polish border come at a time as NATO leaders gather in Washington for a summit with the war on Ukraine on their agenda.
Sino-Belarusian exercises have taken place earlier, but this is the first time since the Russia-Ukraine war started in February 2022.
According to a statement issued on Wednesday by the Chinese defence ministry, the military exercises started on July 8 in Brest, a city near the border with Poland.
The statement said the drill will continue until mid-July, but did not provide the exact number of Chinese troops involved.
Both sides are working to boost war techniques and deepen cooperation and communication between the two armies, the statement added. Chinese officials insisted that the drills were not aimed at any country in particular.
However, the defence ministry of Poland has questioned the timing of the exercises. It warned of the risk of the military drills that coincide with the NATO summit.
Analysts believe that the location and date of the exercises were not chosen by chance and that China wanted to send NATO a strong message.
Kelly Grieco of the Stimson Center foreign policy and defence think tank told AFP that multilateral military exercises are often used to send political signals.
Countries often conduct joint exercises to coincide with developments abroad said Alice Ekman, senior analyst for Asia at the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS).
“In April 2023, the Chinese held exercises with Russia in the East China Sea, close to Japanese islands, on the eve of a trilateral US-Japan-South Korea summit to signal their opposition to such a summit being held,” Ekman said.
China has never forgotten the bombing of its embassy in Belgrade by a NATO plane in 1999 while it also thinks that the alliance has already overstepped its geographical sphere of influence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
