The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promotes a growing strategic relationship with neighbor and fellow authoritarian nation Russia. As recently as February 24, after a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping declared, “The development strategies and foreign policies of China and Russia are long-term,” calling the two countries “good neighbors that cannot be moved apart.”
The statement builds upon a declaration by Xi and Putin two years earlier, on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that the partnership knows “no limits.” The nations showcase their cooperation in energy production, financial exchanges, coast guard patrols, military exercises and a host of other areas. Some news reports say China also is helping Russia produce ammunition and improve its satellite capabilities to aid Russia’s war in Ukraine. China has denied this.
One project that started out with a bilateral bang, though, the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), now appears to be devolving into a China-centric affair, judging from communications issued by the CCP. The cover page of the original, 16-page ILRS Guide for Partnership, published in June 2021, featured the logos of both the China National Space Administration and Roscosmos, the Russian state space corporation. The two agencies “jointly initiated” the ILRS “based on their … existing lunar exploration plan,” the guide said. CNSA and Roscosmos “are designated as the organisations responsible for facilitating cooperation,” according to an ILRS agreement signed in Beijing and Moscow in June 2022. The project would span the lunar orbit and surface as a long-term, unmanned operation with the “prospect of subsequent human presence.”
The guide for partnership features reconnaissance, construction and utilization phases through 2035, with provisions for missions numbered up to CE-8 in China’s case and LUNA-28 for Russia. Every mention of China throughout the guide is tied to a mention of Russia.
Fast forward to today, when a search of the official website of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China turns up five lengthy articles about the ILRS, from September 2023 to September 2024. Only one of them carries any reference to Russia, as a parenthetical provider of a single payload among payloads from many nations. This reference appears in the most recent post. The post also carries an update of overall plans for ILRS — a first phase with a basic facility built by 2035 in the lunar south pole region and a second phase to establish a network connecting the south pole, equator and the moon’s far side by 2050. They are portrayed as strictly Chinese plans.
So where has Russia gone? Answering this question requires a close look at what the two countries are saying about ILRS versus what they actually may be doing. According to some analysis, Russia hasn’t gone anywhere and is hanging onto its role as co-owner of the lunar project — contributing in ways differently than the partners may have envisioned in 2021 but still bringing the experience arising from its standing as the world’s first spacefaring nation. Other analysis detects signs that an ascendant China is indeed pulling away from, or at least moving beyond, its reliance on Russia in the face of its partner’s deteriorating space capabilities since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the global condemnation that followed its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
One-way conversation
One important consideration in these analyses: China may not be talking about Russia in its ILRS pronouncements, but Russia is talking about China, said Antonia Hmaidi, senior analyst with the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.
“The trend seems to be that China doesn’t necessarily expound on its relations with Russia,” Hmaidi told Apogee. “I’ve not seen anything to suggest that space relations are actually worse. It looks like it might be the other way around.” In the past year, Russia has issued its own invitations for nations to partner in the ILRS, including Türkiye and members of the 10-nation BRICS group to which China and Russia belong. China has raised no objection to the invitations publicly. “This suggests to me that for China, Russia is still co-owner of this project.”
What’s more, Russia, with more advanced capabilities in the field, plans to build with China a nuclear reactor on the moon beginning around 2033 to power the ILRS, Roscosmos Director General Yury Borisov said in March 2024. “It’s Russia’s sort of major contribution, you might say, where China’s contribution might be in other areas,” Hmaidi said. “It seems most likely a bit of strategic communication on China’s part not to necessarily focus on its cooperation with Russia. On the ground, I think we’re seeing actually even more cooperation in space.” Other signs, she said: “We have seen reporting about a Russian university opening up a campus close to a commercial space port in China. We have heard about Russian engineers moving to China. So, it seems the cooperation might be changing shape.”
At the same time, she said, “China is, in my mind, quite aware of the limitations of Russia’s space program in recent years. Without Chinese equipment and especially Chinese electronics, the Russian space program couldn’t do anything because they don’t have the domestic manufacturing capacity. Still, there, we don’t see any constraint on China’s part.”
After a May 2024 meeting with Putin, Xi included space exploration in listing major joint projects underway between the two nations. They also included metallurgy, chemical and pulp industries, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and high-tech sectors. In June 2024, Putin ratified the ILRS agreement with China, according to an official list of documents signed by the Russian president.
But Russia’s decline from its towering position as China’s patron in space and one of two historic space powers, along with the United States, has been widely documented. The trend has accelerated as the nation poured its resources into the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and the invasion of the former Soviet nation eight years later. As recently as 2014, Russia promised $70 billion for a 10-year space program. In 2016, struggling economically from reduced oil prices and war-related sanctions, the government approved only $20.5 billion for the program. Another measure: Russia recorded 75 space launches in 1990, but the number fell to 30 in 2000 and just 17 in 2024, according to figures provided by the Rand Corp., an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.
China, by comparison, fell short of its 2024 goal of 100 launches, but it still set a record for the nation by sending 68 rockets into orbit during the year. U.S. launches in 2024 totaled 145, according to data gathered by Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. China, then, appears to rely less on Russia for technical support than it did when the two nations announced the ILRS.
“China, arguably, is fully capable of designing and constructing the ILRS on their own,” said Bruce McClintock, senior researcher and leader of Rand’s Space Enterprise Initiative. McClintock sees a shift in space relations between the two nations. “It’s very clear China has backed off publicly discussing cooperation with Russia and it appears to coincide with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” he said. “Before that time, China was willing to publicly talk about space cooperation with Russia and then, after early 2022, China stopped talking about Russia as an ILRS partner. I think it’s also an indication of a bigger circumstance, in that Russia needs China more than China needs Russia. That’s why Russia continues to talk about it and the Chinese do not.”
Another sign of the shift, McClintock said, is a vote in April 2024 on a United Nations Security Council resolution that would discourage placing in space any objects carrying nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. Japan and the United States introduced the measure amid allegations, confirmed soon afterward by the Pentagon, that Russia was developing an anti-satellite nuclear weapon to deploy in outer space. Russia vetoed the U.N. measure, but China, rather than joining its partner in space with a “no” vote, abstained.
“My sense is that the Chinese abstention … actually was an indication of a bit more of a break between China and Russia,” McClintock said. “The abstention was considered by some a victory for the United States in diplomatic circles, and I think it’s also an indicator of just how irresponsible Russia’s reported development of a space-based anti-satellite nuclear weapon is.” China is growing more dependent upon its space capabilities just as Russia takes steps that pose an indiscriminate threat to the operation of all nations’ satellites. It is possible, then, that China’s abstention indicates “their desire to develop a space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapon is not an acceptable form of behavior.”
Walking a fine line
Still, despite voting differently on the U.N. resolution, China joined with Russia in issuing a statement on the resolution, indicating that China walks a fine line in its space relations with Russia, said Krista Langeland, senior physical scientist and deputy lead of Rand’s Space Enterprise Initiative. “China’s not going to, in lockstep, vote with Russia on this, but they’re certainly willing to make an aligned policy statement. It appears China is reluctant to take sides rather than (China) pulling away.” Langeland added, “Since the Ukraine invasion, maybe China is questioning Russia’s value as a military ally. There’s a perception that Russia wants to destroy the international system in order to build a new one, a different shape of the world order, whereas China’s approach seems to be transforming the current system and taking a more prominent place in it.”
One quality Russia brings to the ILRS partnership, if not its once formidable technical contributions, is a long history of space power, Hmaidi said. “That’s something that we see in Chinese domestic communications, how Russia was the first satellite in space. On that front, they still benefit quite a bit from just this reputation that China cannot bring on its own.” In addition, Hmaidi said, China and Russia share concerns about the role the U.S. enjoys as the world’s dominant hegemonic power. They seek to establish more multipolarity. “So, to me, Russia’s importance in space hasn’t necessarily decreased overall, but it’s just shifted from this hands-on more technical cooperation to more values-based or ideological, almost. It’s more about wanting to get rid of the U.S.-led liberal order, you could say.”
Economically, the nations have a growing reliance upon one another. Total two-way trade reached $240.1 billion in 2023, up 26% from $190 billion a year earlier and 60% from 2021 levels, the last full year of data before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the November 2024 report to Congress from the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission. Selling oil to China and India, though at discounted prices, has helped Russia temper the impact of international economic sanctions over the war. “Given that Russia’s total trade with the world declined 9.6% between 2021 and 2023 from $785.8 billion to $710.2 billion, the Russian economy is increasingly reliant on trade with China to stay afloat,” the annual report said. “Though Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the level of cooperation and Xi pronounced a ‘new era’ in the ‘no limits’ partnership between their countries during his May visit to Beijing, Moscow may come to resent the asymmetry in the relationship.”
For its part, since it began ramping up its space capabilities in the 1990s, China has worked to learn about working in the realm “from countries that aren’t Russia,” Hmaidi said. China tried to join the U.S.-led International Space Station at one point, sought to work with the European Space Agency on developing an alternative to the U.S. GPS, and came close to hosting an ESA astronaut aboard its Tiangong space station. But those efforts were thwarted by a U.S. ban on NASA cooperation over security concerns, the perception that China sought mainly to appropriate European technology for its own ends and in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, China’s ties to Russia. “Russia was really the one spacefaring country that was willing to cooperate,” Hmaidi said.
Today, even as China and Russia cooperate, their views on how to use space differ, Langeland said. For Russia, there is “a lot of examples of using space to counter U.S. influence or in response to U.S. influence or in direct competition with China; how do we develop capabilities in Latin America, for instance, to counter U.S. influence here?” she asked. For China, “space is this kind of critical way of projecting national power.” A key question: “How do we develop our own capabilities and our own relationships? I think it’s more absolute and less relative to U.S. power.” Langeland added, “I think that shapes, historically, how they develop capabilities and how they decide which capabilities to develop, too.”
To illustrate this point, McClintock offered two bookends in the timeline of Russia’s space decline. First is the long line of the nation’s Luna missions to the moon. “The Soviet Union has a very rich history of space exploration that goes back, obviously, to Sputnik,” he said. Then came the crash of the latest Luna mission in August 2023, the same week that a much leaner new India space program succeed in landing a spacecraft on the moon. “Luna 25 was the 25th lunar mission and it failed catastrophically,” McClintock said. “The other bookend is reports that Russia is developing a space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapon. So, they continue to try to do things in space using their technological experience and expertise, but they’re not doing it for civil and peaceful activities in outer space.”
To Russia, space is military
A major change, then, since the first solicitation of ISRL partners in 2021, is that “a significant amount of Russian capabilities go to support their war in Ukraine,” including position, navigation and timing (PNT) , and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). “So, while they’ve had fewer launches, they focused those launches and their space assets on communication, on PNT and ISR that supports the war effort.”
The other nations that have signed onto the ILRS are Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Senegal, Serbia, South Africa, Thailand and Venezuela, as well as entities and companies from several of these nations and from Panama, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. The Chinese goal is less about the technical contributions from other nations than to show ILRS is an international rather than China-only effort, McClintock said. Still, Thailand and the UAE are emerging spacefaring nations with their own space agencies. UAE has launched a Mars probe, and Thailand is the first nation to join both the ILRS and the U.S.-led Artemis Accords, a set of principles grounded in the U.N. Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that promote responsible space exploration and use. The Artemis coalition, led by NASA and the ESA, is mounting a mission to explore the moon and Mars. Fifty-three nations have signed the accords, which doesn’t preclude them from signing other space agreements, the U.S. has made clear.
“Thailand’s addition to the Artemis Accords is proof that nations can work with both the United States and China on space exploration,” McClintock said. “I believe it’s in humanity’s interest to find a way for nations to work with both China and the United States, and maybe even Russia, when it comes to space exploration and harnessing the potential that space offers humanity in general. I think it’s important for long-term space sustainability and for harnessing the potential of space in general. So, I think Thailand’s action is a positive sign.”
Where the nations of the world throw their lot when it comes to future space exploration may depend, in part, on who they see making progress there, McClintock said. “I hesitate to categorize it as some new space race, as some have,” McClintock said. That’s just what Borisov of Roscosmos called it: “A new race to exploit the Moon’s resources has begun,” he said, seeking to shift attention away from the Luna 25 catastrophe within days after the crash. Borisov doubled down on the potential for a crewed China-Russia lunar mission in the future, Reuters reported — even as China remained silent on space cooperation with Russia. In an interview with Russian state television, his first after the August 2023 crash, Borisov said, “This is not just about the prestige of the country and the achievement of some geopolitical goals. This is about ensuring defensive capabilities and achieving technological sovereignty.”
Noting Borisov’s bravado in an essay for the website The Conversation, Richard de Grijs, an astrophysics professor in Beijing with Australia’s Macquarie University, said, “Despite an impressive number of collaboration agreements, high-profile Sino-Russian space projects remain few and far between. If joint human exploration of the Moon is not currently on the cards, it is highly unlikely the Chinese space authorities will take the bait.”
Said McClintock, “I think China can likely count on partnership with Russia given their shared interest in global leadership and space power. However, it seems likely that China will not really need Russia for technical capabilities or necessarily for international stature or credibility — that’s in the short term and even the long term.”