In early September 2025, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) hosted a lavish parade in Beijing to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The tightly choreographed ceremony included more than 10,000 personnel from China’s People's Liberation Army, over 100 aircraft, columns of tanks, artillery, infantry fighting vehicles, and an array of modern military platforms. As such, it served multiple purposes, simultaneously a commemoration of the World War II victory against the Axis powers, a showcase of China’s current warfighting capabilities, and an opportunity for a number of Chinese partners to come to Beijing.
In its official coverage, the Kremlin framed the event as a joint commemoration of “common victory,” drawing parallels between China’s “Victory Day” and its own celebration of the World War II defeat of the Axis powers. Sympathetic media outlets and commentary did much the same; the PRC’s official China Daily, for instance, highlighted an interview with a Russian journalist who insisted that Western alarm was overblown and emphasized the event’s commemorative nature.
In the West, however, the occasion was perceived very differently, for good reason. It marked the first time that Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, had come together in a single event. As such, it was viewed by Western observers as a public affirmation of the vibrancy of the so-called “Axis of Upheaval” that had emerged over the past several years because of the increasingly close strategic coordination among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
The gathering came at a critical time. Months earlier, in June 2025, Israel had launched a devastating military campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. That effort, dubbed “Operation Rising Lion,” was designed to fundamentally reset the regional strategic balance with the Islamic Republic. Over the course of more than a week, Israeli operations decapitated key elements of Iran’s military chain of command, eliminated a significant number of the regime’s nuclear scientists, and incapacitated key nuclear and ballistic missile facilities. In its final stages, the Israeli campaign was augmented by the United States, which employed advanced ordnance to significantly expand the physical damage done to hardened Iranian nuclear facilities.
During the June 2025 conflict, Iran’s strategic partners had been conspicuously absent. To be sure, both Beijing and Moscow issued statements condemning the Israeli-American campaign and expressing their solidarity with Tehran. Russian President Vladimir Putin decried Israel’s bombing campaign, describing it as “unprovoked” and “unacceptable.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a formal statement condemning the attack, terming it a “dangerous escalation.” Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a “de-escalation” of the conflict, while his Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, urged the “safeguarding” of Iran’s national sovereignty.
However, that rhetoric was not matched by meaningful assistance. Neither China nor Russia provided the Islamic Republic with advanced air defenses, emergency weapons transfers, or intelligence support that might have altered the course of the conflict – or at least raised the costs to Jerusalem and Washington of their joint campaign. This absence, in turn, appeared to showcase the operational limits and political fragility of the “axis.”
Notably, in the Middle East conflict begun by Israel and the United States on February 28, 2026, Iran’s partners have done significantly more. Russia has reportedly provided Iran with intelligence to improve the regime’s targeting of Israel as well as U.S. forces and installations in the region. As the conflict has dragged on, it has also reportedly commenced delivery of drones to augment the Islamic Republic’s strategic arsenal. China, meanwhile, has continued to play a critical role as an economic lifeline for the Iranian regime, maintaining its purchases of Iranian crude even as the conflict continues to play out. The PRC has also reportedly continued to supply the Islamic Republic with precursor chemicals for its ballistic missile program. This comparative activism can be chalked up to the fact that, unlike the June 2025 war, the current conflict threatens to fundamentally destabilize the Iranian regime, or overthrow it entirely – thereby raising the prospects that a critical ally for both Moscow and Beijing could be taken off the board entirely.
Back in mid-2025, however, the regime was not in danger, and support from Iran’s “axis” allies was minimal. That passivity, in turn, was noted in Tehran. In the weeks that followed the “Twelve Day War,” Iranian officials made extensive efforts to expand their strategic contacts with partner nations in the “axis.” In July 2025, Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh met in Moscow with his Russian counterpart, Andrey Belousov, in an effort to add concrete substance to the 20-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty that had been hammered out between the two nations earlier in the year. Days later, at the July Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) ministerial meeting in Tianjin, China, Iranian officials pressed for deeper strategic coordination with the PRC and other bloc members, underscoring Tehran’s determination to embed itself more firmly within the emerging axis. With North Korea as well, longstanding military-technical ties took on added resonance amid the fallout from the June conflict and other geopolitical shifts. As such, the Islamic Republic’s formal presence in Beijing in September 2025 was, for Tehran, a much-sought-after affirmation that its strategic partnerships remained both viable and salient.
The Wages of Ukraine
As important as the September 2025 gathering was for Iran, however, it was arguably even more so for Moscow. Over the preceding three-and-a-half years, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine had imposed enormous political, economic, and strategic costs on the Kremlin. Widening sanctions levied by the United States had prompted more than 500 foreign companies to exit the Russian market, while over 1,000 curtailed their operations in Russia at least to some degree. The measures likewise triggered a sharp collapse in energy revenues – with Russian export income falling to historic lows in 2025 – and the technological isolation of key economic sectors, such as aviation and semiconductors, forcing Moscow to rely on Chinese substitutes as a result. Widening sanctions levied by the United States and Europe had led to the partial exit of hundreds of corporations from the Russian market, a collapse in energy revenues, and the technological isolation of key economic sectors.
By mid-2025, these pressures had pushed Russia into economic stagnation and fundamentally transformed its economy into a “wartime” one that necessitates continued conflict for its smooth functioning.
The war had likewise touched off the largest outflow of Russians from the country since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, creating massive brain drain and dislocation. By early 2024, multiple estimates suggested that somewhere between 800,000 and one million Russians had departed the country since the start of the Kremlin’s “special military operation.” Surveys and reports indicate that this exodus has been disproportionately composed of young, urban, highly educated professionals, with especially heavy losses in the science, technology, and higher education sectors. For instance, one official U.S. analysis in 2023, drawing on both Russian and international data, put the number of information technology (IT) specialists that had by then departed the country at 100,000 – around 10% of the total number of people employed in that sector in Russia. Other assessments at the time found that as much as 30% of Russia’s active open-source developers had moved abroad during the first year of the conflict.
High‑profile departures included elite technocrats (such as former Kremlin insider and reformist economist Anatoly Chubais), cultural icons like singer Alla Pugacheva and comedian Maxim Galkin, and a broad range of younger technology workers and entrepreneurs who resettled in places like Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, and Finland. Many also sought refuge in Germany and other European states, but restrictive European Union regulations, in the form of visa restrictions and tougher asylum standards, made doing so difficult.
At the same time, the human toll from the conflict has been immense. In early 2026, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte estimated that Moscow was averaging between 20,000 and 25,000 casualties per month as a result of its war effort. Expert analyses now gauge that more than 1.2 million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the start of the conflict in February 2022 – making the Ukraine war more costly, in human terms, than all of the country’s foreign military engagements since the end of World War II combined.
This has created an unsustainable dynamic for preserving Russian military power. “Russian military losses, of those killed and wounded, now exceed sustainable recruitment and replacement rates,” James Ford, Britain’s deputy ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has noted. Over time, this can be expected to make the Russian military less capable of achieving its current maximalist, neo-imperial objectives, even as economic priorities make continued conflict (either in Ukraine or beyond) a necessity for domestic stability.
Notably, this attrition has also significantly worsened Russia’s long-running demographic decline. For more than half-a-century, first the Soviet state and then the Russian one has struggled with low birth rates, high mortality, and a range of other indicators that have contributed to sustained population decline. This trend, moreover, has persisted despite repeated Kremlin attempts at remediation.
The results are both significant and potentially ruinous. A 2019 UN study projected that under a “median” scenario, Russia would experience a population decline to 135 million by the year 2050, while under a “pessimistic” scenario, the decline could reach 124.6 million by 2050 and 83.7 million by the year 2100. The war in Ukraine has made these matters significantly worse. Ideological objectors, political opponents, and those simply seeking to avoid conscription by the Kremlin have sought to exit the country – creating what the Washington Post has judged to be “a tidal wave” of emigration on a par with the 1991 Soviet collapse.
Simultaneously, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has imposed unprecedented economic costs on the Kremlin. By mid-2025, that figure exceeded $500 billion in direct expenditures, equivalent to roughly 25-30% of annual GDP when adjusted for hidden spending. This has led to a ballooning of the country’s national defense budget, which now totals some 8% of GDP ($169 billion annually).
Against this backdrop, Russia has become increasingly dependent on its external strategic partnerships. The Kremlin’s ties to Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang have allowed it to weather international sanctions, overcome chronic resource and manpower constraints, and provided it with alternative trading and political opportunities as markets and polities in the West have become less accessible. In the process, they have transformed Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine from a bilateral affair into a truly international enterprise.
Understanding the Axis
Over the past several years, the accelerating contacts between Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang have generated considerable consternation among Western officials and observers alike, for good reason. Senior U.S. and NATO officials have warned that Russia’s growing alignment with its authoritarian partners has assisted in “fueling Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine” as well as creating broader security consequences for the Western-led order. U.S. experts and officials have argued in parallel that the expanding defense cooperation taking place among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is allowing each of these governments to “offset vulnerabilities relative to the United States” in terms of their strategic capabilities – filling critical gaps in military means and technology that make them “more formidable and resilient adversaries.”
At first blush, Russia’s contemporary strategic partnerships appear extensive, encompassing economic cooperation, military assistance, and coordination across a range of foreign policy and strategic domains. Yet these ties are less durable than they appear. Underneath the high-level summits and declaratory statements lie a set of relationships that are fundamentally transactional, asymmetrical in scope, and deeply contingent on shifting circumstances.
The “no limits” partnership between Russia and China announced in 2022, for instance, is underpinned by a growing imbalance of power that has steadily eroded Moscow’s leverage relative to Beijing, even as the latter has been careful to limit its material support to the Kremlin in ways that avoid secondary sanctions or deeper entanglement. Similarly, Russia’s expanding cooperation with Iran, which has been greatly accelerated by the war in Ukraine, has been driven less by strategic affinity than by immediate necessity and practical considerations, resulting in a partnership marked by tactical dependence rather than durable alignment. Even North Korea’s growing alignment with and dependence on Russia, exemplified by the DPRK’s transfers of both munitions and military personnel, reflects a convergence of short-term needs rather than a stable, integrated partnership.
Indeed, across the so-called “axis,” cooperation is often issue-specific and episodic, rather than institutionalized and undergirded by a shared strategic vision. At the same time, these relationships are shot through with historic mistrust, competing regional ambitions, and latent fears of the other – features that constrain both their depth and their cohesion. As a result, what appears from afar to be a coherent and consolidated anti-Western bloc is, in practice, a loose and often uneasy alignment – one whose internal contradictions limit its effectiveness. As such, there is considerable merit in Western policymakers exploring the faultlines that might enable them to fracture, or at least diminish, the contemporary partnerships among Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang.
Mistrust and Distrust
Such an inquiry begins with the recognition that the dynamics of mistrust that currently punctuate Russia’s external relationships are deeply embedded in the country’s strategic culture and policymaking. Although Russian officials often articulate their foreign policy in the language of realism, emphasizing sovereignty, balance of power, and great-power competition, their actual worldview is more complex and layered. It blends realist calculations with a persistent preoccupation with their country’s status as a great power, with historical grievance, and with perceived vulnerability. As such, the persistent mistrust that dominates Russia’s external relations, writ large and particularly with its so-called strategic partners, reflects how the country’s policymakers view the international system and their place in it.
This is evident in Moscow’s approach to its contemporary partnerships. Russian officials do not treat alignment with China, Iran, and North Korea as the foundation of a durable bloc, at least in the Western sense. Rather, they see them as fluid, interest-driven arrangements that must be continuously monitored and managed. This approach views material interests through the lens of insecurity and competition and sees partnership (even with dominant players such as China) as a tool rather than an end in and of itself.
As a result, Russia’s place in the emerging “axis” is inherently ambivalent. The Kremlin sees itself as a participant in a shared project of opposing Western influence but remains reluctant to subordinate its autonomy or decision-making to this collective enterprise or expand its liability meaningfully in support of this enterprise. The pages that follow seek to identify key themes, narratives, and dynamics in Russia’s respective bilateral relationships with China, Iran, and the DPRK – those that indicate friction or distrust between the parties. These include:
- Historical narratives and perceptions of the other, including competing territorial claims, grievances, and unresolved tensions that remain from prior decades and earlier phases of cooperation and competition;
- Ideology and contemporary geopolitical objectives, and the influence that these factors exert over Russia’s propensity for broad-based cooperation;
- Economic competition and resource dependence, as each country seeks to improve its own economic position;
- Technological and intelligence sector distrust, as exemplified by curtailed cooperation, protectionism, espionage, and other indicators.
Additionally, the war in Ukraine looms large as a shaping force. Since the escalation of its military campaign against Ukraine in February 2022, Russia’s relations with all three countries have changed significantly, with Moscow increasingly forced to rely on inputs from its international partners to sustain the war of aggression against its western neighbor. This assistance, in turn, has affected the international standing, economic relationships, and political priorities of the other members of the “axis” – and has done so overwhelmingly negatively.
This report offers an analysis of the prevailing dynamics of Russia’s parallel partnerships with China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as the limits and flaws in those ties. The assessment is driven by a review of primary and secondary sources, as well as historical accounts, in both English and Russian, among them:
- Official statements by key Russian officials;
- The writings and analyses of prominent Russian scholars, thought leaders, and public intellectuals;
- Commentaries in Russian publications and media outlets.
The salience of these viewpoints and ideological currents will be assessed in relation to contemporary Russian foreign policy. Such a task is assuredly not without its challenges. In recent years, the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Putin regime has had a chilling effect on media freedoms and accurate reporting within the Russian Federation. This was true even before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as organizations such as Reporters Without Borders have documented. However, the trend has worsened dramatically since, as Moscow has sought to shape domestic discourse about its “special military operation” – including through legal penalties, sanctions, and the deplatforming of coverage that does not comport with its official line.
Additionally, the Kremlin’s expertise in disinformation and propaganda has been harnessed to great effect, as Russian state media organs have worked extensively to shape international perceptions of the conflict. All of this requires observers to exercise heightened scrutiny and skepticism when assessing official narratives, statements, and media output.
Nevertheless, it is still possible to glean genuine insights from sources such as those listed above, when triangulated with reputable secondary analyses. That, in turn, will offer insights into how best the United States and its international partners can limit the current convergence between these countries. It will also illuminate which “competitive strategies” could prove most effective in affecting the durability and coherence of the contemporary partnerships through which Russia seeks to advance its own geopolitical objectives at the expense of the West.
Key Takeaways
Russia’s parallel partnerships with China, Iran, and North Korea fall short of being true alliances. Rather, they are, in a practical sense, relationships of convenience. They are instrumental in enabling Moscow to maintain its otherwise unsustainable strategic objectives (both vis-à-vis Ukraine and beyond). They are likewise animated by antipathy toward the West in general and the United States in particular—an antipathy that is shared in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang. Yet these relationships rest on fundamentally fragile foundations that limit their depth and expose them to potential disruption. Key faultlines include:
Imperial memory and territorial grievances. For China, these take the form of “lost territories” that, in the view of Chinese officials and laymen alike, were unjustly seized by Russia during periods of Chinese vulnerability. For Iran, historical mistrust lingers from czarist encroachments as well as Soviet-era interventions along its periphery. For North Korea, the memory of abandonment by post-Soviet Russia amid its 1990s famine persists, as does the conviction that the USSR’s downfall was brought about by capitulation to Western capitalism and an abandonment of socialist principles.
Ideological frictions. The neo-Eurasian civilizational identity that has come to dominate contemporary Russian politics is fundamentally at odds with the self-conceptions of China, Iran, and North Korea. China’s worldview, for instance, is rooted in a selective reading of history that places the Middle Kingdom at the center of global affairs. As a result, the PRC views itself, in the words of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, as the “sole sovereign government of the world” as well as “the center of its own hierarchical and theoretically universal concept of world order.” For its part, Iran, despite its current, diminished geopolitical status, still sees itself as a regional hegemon and a natural inheritor of the Middle East. The DPRK, meanwhile, has embraced Juche-inspired isolationism that has led the country to resist subordination to either Russia or China, as both powers would prefer.
Economic imbalances. Trade asymmetries likewise dominate Russia’s relations with the other members of the “axis.” As a result of its growing international isolation, Russia has become something of a raw-materials appendage to the PRC, dependent on Beijing for energy sales to maintain its war momentum and to generally remain solvent. Iran, meanwhile, is a competitor for the very same Asian markets as is Russia—a competition that is exacerbated by longstanding Western sanctions on the Islamic Republic and the return of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, which is designed to marginalize and ultimately bankrupt the Iranian regime. At the same time, the DPRK’s military contributions and labor participation have aided Russia’s war effort and economy but have failed to make North Korea more than a tactical partner for the Kremlin’s development—even as Russian revenue has materially assisted the Kim regime to retain its solvency.
Strategic rivalries. Each of Russia’s contemporary partnerships is likewise hampered by competition, either current or latent, across a range of geographic and functional domains. With China, Russia faces a future rivalry over the political disposition of Central Asia and the Black Sea, the Arctic, and potentially the Russian Far East—even as growing economic dependence on Beijing makes Moscow increasingly uncompetitive and subservient in those places. With Iran, geopolitical tensions over the “Near Abroad” (in particular the South Caucasus) continue to simmer, driven in no small measure by Russian memories of Iran’s radical activist presence in the region in the immediate post-Soviet period. And while North Korean assistance to Russia’s current war effort has provided tactical aid, it has also helped fuel leverage-seeking on Pyongyang's part, including potentially redoubled North Korean efforts to reunify the Peninsula under its own leadership—something that would be at odds with Russian priorities in Asia.