Moscow and Beijing have not built a joint military space command, and they do not need one. Selective cooperation in missile warning, navigation, air and missile defense, and potentially counterspace operations is already making both countries harder to deter and US space power more vulnerable.
There is no evidence of a combined Russian-Chinese space command, no confirmed joint anti-satellite force, no integrated missile-warning network comparable to NORAD, and no known arrangement under which an attack on one country’s space assets would oblige the other to respond. Yet Moscow and Beijing are increasingly cooperating precisely in areas where limited coordination can produce disproportionate strategic effects.
Their relationship is best understood not as an emerging military alliance, but as selective strategic integration. Using this approach, they increasingly exchange technology, operational experience, infrastructure, and strategic concepts designed to reduce US military advantages.
Their joint exercises have so far displayed limited interoperability, but even modest coordination can complicate US and NATO defense planning.
The clearest example came in October 2019, when Vladimir Putin publicly acknowledged that Russia was helping China develop a missile attack early-warning system. He described the technology as something only Russia and the United States possessed at the time, and said Russian assistance would significantly improve China’s defense capabilities.
Missile warning lies close to the heart of nuclear deterrence. It allows a state to detect launches, estimate the scale and direction of an attack, and give political leaders more time to decide whether and how to respond. A sophisticated architecture eventually combines ground-based radars, space-based infrared sensors, communications, processing, and nuclear command-and-control.
Russian assistance could accelerate both Chinese ground- and space-based missile-warning capabilities, and improve Beijing’s missile defenses. Moscow appears to be helping Beijing build Chinese capabilities, rather than merging Russian and Chinese warning networks. Real-time integration would move the relationship significantly closer to alliance territory. Yet the transfer itself tells us something important: Russia has been willing to share technology directly relevant to the survivability of China’s nuclear deterrent.
Russia and China conducted computer-based joint air and missile defense exercises in 2016 and 2017. These involved responses to ballistic and cruise missile attacks and required at least some exchange of approaches to detection, command, target allocation, and defensive operations.
Ballistic missile defense is one of the explicitly defense-related components of bilateral space cooperation, although the exercises do not prove the existence of an integrated Russian-Chinese missile defense architecture.
Both view US missile defense not simply as protection against attack, but as a potential element of a broader American damage-limitation strategy. In their view, stronger defensive systems could undermine the credibility of Russian or Chinese nuclear retaliation by intercepting forces that survive a first strike. Donald Trump’s Golden Dome project has reinforced this convergence.
A 2025 Russian-Chinese joint statement on strategic stability argued that Golden Dome threatened the relationship between strategic offensive and defensive forces and would accelerate the deployment of weapons and interception systems in space.
The argument was repeated at the Xi-Putin summit in May. If Russia and China increasingly view US missile warning, tracking satellites, missile defense, long-range conventional strike, and nuclear forces as parts of a single strategic architecture, it creates powerful incentives to cooperate on technologies capable both of protecting their own systems and threatening America’s.
Russia and China have spent years improving compatibility between their GLONASS and BeiDou satellite navigation systems, exchanging monitoring information and developing ground infrastructure. In November 2025, the two governments signed a new Russia-China satellite-navigation cooperation roadmap for 2026–2030.
Official documents emphasize peaceful and civilian uses, and it would be wrong to present the arrangement as a confirmed joint military navigation network. Global navigation systems support precision weapons, aircraft, unmanned systems, naval operations, timing, communications, and military logistics. Access to an alternative positioning and timing architecture makes the loss or degradation of one national system less catastrophic.
Cooperation could allow either Russia or China to retain access to an alternative navigation signal if its own system were denied or degraded. At the same time, civilian GNSS interoperability is not unique—other global navigation systems also cooperate at the civil-signal level. So the threat is not that BeiDou and GLONASS have suddenly become one military constellation. It is that Russia and China are gradually reducing single points of failure in infrastructure essential to modern warfare.
A July investigation by the independent Russian media outlet, The Insider, together with European media partners, reported on documents from secret Russian-Chinese military-technical forums. Most striking was a Chinese proposal discussed at a November 2023 forum in Guangzhou for countering Starlink.
According to the documents, the concept followed a graduated approach: regulatory and diplomatic pressure, electronic warfare, cyber operations, and ultimately physical attacks against the satellite constellation.
The Congressional USCC China-Russia Fact Sheet states that leaked documents revealed a Chinese-drafted escalation plan. It warns that deeper space cooperation could improve battlefield awareness and communications for Russia and China while degrading satellite communications available to the United States and its partners.
A proliferated low earth orbit (LEO) network therefore requires a different approach: attack the spectrum, terminals, software, ground infrastructure, data links, or many satellites simultaneously.
China now possesses a stronger space-industrial base. Beijing can finance and produce large constellations on a scale Moscow can no longer easily match.
The war in Ukraine has provided Moscow with years of practical experience against satellite-supported communications, drones, commercial imagery, precision weapons, and Western electronic systems. Russia has also repeatedly attempted to disrupt Starlink on the battlefield.
For China, which studies modern warfare with a potential Taiwan conflict in mind, that experience is exceptionally valuable. The new USCC assessment captures the changing balance well: Russia once armed China; increasingly, technology and economic leverage flow in the opposite direction, while Ukraine provides the Chinese military with a real-world laboratory from which to learn.
The resulting relationship is highly complementary. Neither needs to transfer everything. Even selective exchanges can close weaknesses in the other’s military architecture.
They do not share a common strategic culture, and their military exercises often demonstrate political alignment more convincingly than genuine interoperability. But a space alliance is not necessary to threaten US interests.
Both expand space surveillance capabilities. Yet every step makes each country somewhat harder to disable and American space superiority somewhat less assured.
Europe still depends heavily on the United States for the most sophisticated military space functions: space-based ISR, missile warning, high-end space situational awareness, and launch.
NATO’s European members continue to rely on the United States as the provider of orbital early-warning information through systems including SBIRS. That means a successful Russian attack on US military space infrastructure in a European war would not affect only American forces. If Chinese technology, data, components, or research made Russian counterspace operations more capable, Beijing could alter the European military balance without firing a shot.
There is no known permanent exchange of targeting data on US satellites. And there is no proof that the Russo-Chinese Starlink concepts have progressed from discussion to deployment. Secrecy makes the relationship unusually difficult to evaluate: some agreements may contain less than public announcements suggest, while classified cooperation could also be substantially deeper than outsiders can see.
Three developments would mark a qualitative change. The first would be evidence that Russian and Chinese missile-warning systems exchange operational data in real time. The second would be integration of their space-surveillance networks sufficient to generate shared tracking or targeting information on Western military spacecraft.
The third would be joint testing of electronic, cyber, or physical systems designed to attack proliferated LEO constellations. Any of these would move the relationship beyond technology sharing toward an operational military-space architecture. That point has not yet been reached.
Russia and China do not need a formal alliance to challenge the West in space. They need only to make each other more resilient against US power — while becoming progressively better at attacking the systems on which that power depends. They are already doing both.
Maxim Starchak is an independent expert on nuclear policy, strategic weapons and defense industry. Fellow at the Centre for International and Defence Policy of the Queen’s University, and a Russia Correspondent for the European Security & Defence magazine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
