OPINION: Beijing preaches peace at the UN and secretly trains Putin's soldiers

Introduction: Documented duplicity in two acts

June 30, 2026 in New York: a call for peace at the Security Council

On June 30, 2026, during a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York, China's ambassador to the United Nations, Sun Lei, delivered the following words with measured gravity: "Conflicts resolve no problems. That is why we strongly call for an end to the conflict as soon as possible. We strongly call for a return to negotiations, for a sincere political will to be demonstrated." He added that China maintained an "impartial position" on the war in Ukraine and was prepared to "tirelessly facilitate the peace process."

That same week, Reuters published a first-rate scoop. According to two European officials and documents reviewed by the agency, China conducted clandestine military training of Russian soldiers in 2025, personally approved by Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov. The training covered radiological, chemical, and biological protection and directly involved at least four Russian and Chinese generals. These two realities coexist simultaneously: Beijing preaches peace at the Security Council while training Putin's soldiers in its own military facilities.

What Reuters revealed: the facts behind the secret training

Belousov, Muradov, Li Jinsun: the names behind the secret

The Reuters investigation published July 1, 2026 rests on two European officials and military documents reviewed by the agency. A classified Russian military document reportedly references an internal decree signed by Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov in August 2025 authorizing the training. The two European officials identified the signatories of a July 2 agreement underpinning the training: Russian Major General Rustam Khusainov and Chinese Senior Colonel Sun Dayun.

Among the senior participants were General Rustam Muradov, deputy commander-in-chief of Russia's ground forces, who led the Russian delegation, and Chinese Major General Li Jinsun, head of the PLA's Academy of Military Sciences for Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense, present at the opening of one of the courses. Documented sessions included a November 2025 training in Beijing with approximately 200 Russian military personnel, some of whom have since joined the front lines in Ukraine. Another session took place in Nanjing. A Russian internal report on the Nanjing training praised the quality of Chinese equipment and the high theoretical knowledge of the instructors — while noting their lack of real combat experience.

The type of training: radiological, chemical, biological

The details disclosed about the training content deserve careful attention. It focused on radiological, chemical, and biological protection, chemical reconnaissance, radiological reconnaissance, and the protection of ventilation systems against contamination. Russian soldiers were photographed in internal documents examining a nuclear reactor model and attending courses on CBRN defense.

This choice of specialty is not incidental. Russia has repeatedly invoked the threat of unconventional weapons in the Ukrainian context — never following through, but maintaining psychological pressure on Kyiv's allies. Training its soldiers in CBRN protection with Chinese assistance may reflect a defensive logic, but it may equally signal preparation for contaminated combat environments. European capitals, which receive intelligence briefings on these training sessions, are right to be alarmed.

Beijing's posture at the UN: anatomy of a facade of neutrality

"Impartial": the word that carries the entire lie

Ambassador Sun Lei used the word "impartial" to describe China's position on the war in Ukraine. That word is at the heart of Beijing's foreign policy narrative since February 24, 2022. China presents itself as a potential mediator, an actor that has not taken sides, that engages all parties, that does not supply lethal weapons to Russia — a distinction Beijing formally maintains while delivering to Moscow the electronic components, machine tools, and industrial equipment that keep its war machine running.

The EU has described China as a "decisive facilitator" of Russia's war. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas stated on June 15 that Brussels had confirmed through its own channels that the military training had indeed taken place and was now assessing its implications. Within the European Council, quiet discussions are underway about the need for additional measures — taking into account the commercial considerations that make any action against Beijing politically costly for some member states.

The call for peace and its unspoken conditions

Sun Lei's Security Council speech called for negotiations grounded in "full and unconditional adherence to the principles of the UN Charter" and on "addressing the root causes of the conflict." This formulation is far from neutral. The "root causes" framing is precisely the one Putin uses to justify his aggression — invoking NATO enlargement and Russian security. By reproducing that framework without qualification, Beijing implicitly validates Moscow's narrative before the UN Security Council.

Worse still: a call for negotiations "without preconditions" objectively favors Russia, which militarily occupies 18 percent of Ukrainian territory and would benefit from a ceasefire that freezes its territorial gains. For Zelensky and Ukraine, negotiating on those terms would amount to legitimizing a territorial conquest by armed force — a precedent the international order grounded in the UN Charter is supposed to prohibit.

The EU facing China: between sanctions and commercial calculus

The existing sanctions and their limits

The EU has already imposed sanctions on Chinese companies it identifies as supporting Russia's war effort. These measures primarily target companies supplying dual-use components — electronics, semiconductors, machine tools — whose presence in Russian weapons has been documented by analyses of materiel captured on the Ukrainian battlefield. The analysis by the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) published June 26, 2026 details how China supplied approximately 70 percent of Russia's ammonium perchlorate imports in 2024 — an oxidizer essential to solid rocket fuels.

But these sanctions remain limited. China accounts for between 37 and 38 percent of Russian imports in 2023–2024, compared to 13–14 percent in 2021. Chinese companies have, according to Ukrainian sources cited by the ICDS, contributed to the increased production of Iskander-M missiles at the Votkinsk factory between 2023 and 2024. Sino-Russian economic cooperation has become one of the pillars that allows Moscow to circumvent Western sanctions — and the EU has not yet found a way to respond to this reality without severing its own commercial ties with Beijing.

Kallas and the redefinition of the European gaze on China

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas is direct in her diagnosis: the EU must "stop seeing China primarily through an economic lens" and focus on what she calls its role as "decisive facilitator of Russia's war." That framing breaks with the strategic economic partner rhetoric that dominated EU-China relations for two decades. It acknowledges that foreign policy and trade policy can no longer be treated as watertight compartments when facing a China that combines the two in a coherent strategy of support for Moscow.

But translating that diagnosis into concrete policy is another matter. Direct Chinese investment in the EU and the UK still reached 10 billion euros in 2024, according to ICDS data. Many member states — particularly those in central and southern Europe — maintain close economic ties with Beijing that complicate any common approach. The gap between the strategic diagnosis and the capacity for collective action remains the EU's structural Achilles heel when facing China.

Russia denies and the Kremlin stays silent

The Russian response: between denial and contortion

When asked about the Reuters report, the Kremlin refused to comment, redirecting to "false information published in the West." Russian parliamentarian Andrei Kartapolov, who chairs the Russian parliament's Defense Committee, called the report "pure nonsense" and declared that Russian military personnel had "nothing to learn from China." It is a striking denial: if the training were nonexistent or irrelevant, the logical response would be a factual rebuttal with counter-evidence. Calling it "nonsense" without substantive refutation is not a refutation.

The response from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs followed a similar line: the allegations are "entirely without foundation," Beijing's position on the Ukrainian crisis has "remained consistent." This type of denial — categorical but detail-free, with no invitation to examine the cited documents, no counter-investigation proposed — is the form that state-level lies take when they are sufficiently documented that a detailed refutation would risk revealing more than silence.

What the Russian internal report from Nanjing reveals despite itself

Among the most revealing details in the Reuters scoop is a Russian internal military report on the Nanjing training, which praised the quality of Chinese army equipment and the high theoretical mastery of its instructors — while noting their lack of real combat experience. That last point is involuntarily informative: the Russians learn theory and equipment from the Chinese, but remain superior in tactical experience. It sketches a cooperation where each side brings what the other lacks — and where the combined result is more dangerous than either party alone.

What makes this cooperation particularly alarming is its institutional structure. This is not a handful of officers informally exchanging notes. It involves an agreement signed between designated generals, approved by ministerial decree, conducted in installations specialized in strategically sensitive domains. It is a structured, planned, and top-level-approved military cooperation — while their respective representatives preach peace at the United Nations.

The concrete consequences for Ukraine

Soldiers trained by China on Ukrainian front lines

Reuters specifies that among the roughly 200 Russian soldiers trained in Beijing in November 2025, some have since joined the theater of operations in Ukraine. This transforms the secret training from an abstract diplomatic issue into a direct operational reality. Russian soldiers better prepared to operate in contaminated environments — or to conduct operations involving CBRN risks — are now potentially facing Ukrainian forces.

The context is one of a conflict where Russia has used chemical irritants on multiple occasions according to Western assessments, and where the threat of escalation toward more lethal agents remains an element of Russia's pressure strategy. Training Russian soldiers in CBRN defense with Chinese assistance, at a time when those soldiers are deployed in Ukraine, constitutes a direct contribution to Russian offensive capability — regardless of the stated intentions behind the training.

What Zelensky sees from Kyiv

From Kyiv, the reading of these developments is clear. Zelensky has repeatedly stated that China is not neutral in this conflict — and that Beijing's facade of neutrality objectively serves Moscow's interests. The Reuters scoop merely confirms what Ukrainian intelligence services had been communicating to their Western partners for months. What changes is that the evidence is now sufficiently documented to be published in international media without risking credible contestation.

Zelensky's strategic patience vis-à-vis China is remarkable. He has avoided transforming Beijing into a declared enemy, keeping the door open to potential mediation, likely understanding that in a long conflict, states that can speak to all parties have genuine value. But each revelation like Reuters' makes that position harder to sustain publicly — and risks feeding popular and parliamentary pressure for a firmer response toward Beijing.

EU sanctions: insufficient in the face of the scale of cooperation

What the existing sanctions do not cover

The EU has already sanctioned Chinese companies identified as suppliers of dual-use components to Russia. But the revelation of direct military training approved at ministerial level falls outside the framework of commercial dual-use goods regulation. It involves a government-to-government military cooperation that current commercial sanctions instruments are not designed to address. The EU imposes sanctions on Huawei and ZTE for their potential role in sensitive infrastructure — but has no equivalent tool to sanction a cooperation between generals approved by the decree of a third state's defense minister.

The European Parliament has adopted resolutions calling for a firmer approach toward China, but the legal instruments to implement that firmness remain limited. The European sanctions regime was designed to respond to economic pressure — not to a strategic military cooperation between two permanent members of the UN Security Council. Bridging that gap would require new legal mechanisms that few member states are currently prepared to negotiate.

The risk of secondary sanction circumvention: when Chinese banks calculate their exposure

The ICDS analysis notes that major Chinese banks have already restricted their direct transactions with Russian counterparties out of fear of American secondary sanctions. This is a sign that the threat of costs has real substance: when Chinese companies calculate risk exposure, they factor in the potential repercussions on their access to American and European markets. This calculation logic is one of the few effective levers democracies hold over Beijing.

But that lever requires consistency: secondary sanctions only work if Chinese companies genuinely believe in the risk of seeing them enforced. Every time the West hesitates, negotiates exemptions, or delays measures out of commercial concern, it erodes the lever's credibility. The Reuters revelation is an opportunity: if the EU and the United States choose to respond with targeted and named measures, they reaffirm that military cooperation with Moscow carries a real cost. If they do not, Beijing's calculation remains unchanged.

What this double game means for the international order

When the Security Council becomes a platform for lies

There is a cruel irony in the fact that it was precisely at the UN Security Council — the body whose mission is to maintain international peace and security — that the Chinese ambassador chose to deliver his peace message on June 30, 2026. The institution was built on the assumption that its permanent members — the veto holders — would act in good faith during moments of crisis. Russia violated that assumption on February 24, 2022, by invading Ukraine. China violates it every time it calls for peace while knowing full well what it is doing in its military facilities. The institution survives, but its moral standing erodes.

The question is not merely whether China supports Russia — the evidence answers that question. The question is why the West continues to participate in the diplomatic ritual as though Chinese declarations carry informational value. Every joint communiqué that thanks China for its balanced position, every meeting where Sun Lei is heard with unchallenged courtesy, contributes to legitimizing a posture whose contents Reuters has just exposed. Diplomatic courtesy should not be confused with acceptance of state-level lies.

The precedent this sets for future conflicts

If China succeeds in simultaneously maintaining the status of peace broker and military facilitator without incurring significant costs, it creates a precedent for every future conflict. Other actors are watching what Beijing does and assessing whether the same strategy would be available to them. Iran, which also presents itself as a neutral actor in certain diplomatic spaces while supplying drones and missiles to Russia, is following a similar playbook with less sophistication. The normalization of this double register weakens the norms that have historically limited conflict escalation.

For Ukraine and its allies, the danger is not only China itself — it is the erosion of the West's collective capacity to name and sanction violations of those norms. When the response to a secret military training approved by ministerial decree amounts to Kaja Kallas "assessing the implications," it sends a message that Beijing reads clearly: the risk of a strong response is low. That perception must change if the West wants to preserve any deterrent value in its norms.

Conclusion: The contradiction the West must name

Beijing's double register can no longer be ignored

The two established facts at the heart of this opinion piece — Ambassador Sun Lei's call for peace at the UN Security Council on June 30, 2026, and Reuters' revelation of a clandestine Chinese military training of Russian soldiers approved by ministerial decree — are not two pieces of information that cancel each other out. They are two components of the same policy. Beijing wants to be recognized as a potential mediator and continue to support Moscow militarily at the same time. Those two objectives are incompatible in a world where words have meaning — but they remain compatible in a world where great powers agree on a shared diplomatic fiction.

The EU, the United States, and their allies have a responsibility to refuse that fiction. Not by declaring a trade war on China — that would be a disproportionate and counterproductive response. But by publicly naming the contradiction, calibrating the costs imposed on Beijing for its military cooperation with Moscow, and ceasing to treat Ambassador Sun Lei's speeches as though they reflected a sincere diplomatic reality. Peace is not built on foundations of state-level lies. And supporting Ukraine also means refusing to pretend that its adversaries are neutral.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Editorial positioning and sources

This opinion piece is based on primary and secondary sources cited at the end of the article. The exact quotes from Ambassador Sun Lei come from the Ukrpravda report of June 30, 2026. The details of the military training come from the Reuters investigation published July 1, 2026. The economic data on Sino-Russian relations comes from the ICDS analysis. No invented facts, no fictional testimony.

Acknowledged limitations

The Reuters investigation rests on two European officials and documents whose authenticity cannot be independently verified. China and Russia deny the facts. This uncertainty is mentioned in the article. The editorial judgment — that the denials do not constitute substantive refutations — is the columnist's own and may be contested. The precise operational consequences of the training for the Ukrainian conflict remain in part speculative.

Sources

Primary sources

Ukrpravda — China «strongly» calls on Putin and Zelenskyy to return to negotiations, by Iryna Balachuk — June 30, 2026

Reuters — EXCLUSIVE: Russia approved secret China military training at top level, sources say — July 1, 2026

Secondary sources

International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) — Has the China-Russia Partnership Peaked?, by Harald Edinger — June 26, 2026

CyberWarrior76 — Strategic Cyber Threat Intelligence — June 2026

CSIS — Pekingology: Inside the China-Russia Partnership — 2026

CSIS — The CRINK Axis: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea — 2026