China’s People’s Liberation Army is set to participate in Russia and Belarus’s Victory Day parades to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany on Friday, the ministry of defence in Beijing said.
The parades are being held in the Russian and Belarusian capital cities of Moscow and Minsk to commemorate the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany at the hands of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War Two but pushed Nazi forces back to Berlin, where Hitler committed suicide and the red Soviet Victory Banner was raised over the Reichstag in 1945.
“At the invitation of the defence ministries of Russia and Belarus, the Guard of Honour of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) will dispatch contingents to respectively participate in the military parades held in Moscow of Russia and Minsk of Belarus on 9 May to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War,” China’s ministry of defence said in a statement.
Videos shared on Chinese social media have shown PLA’s troops rehearsing in Minsk and Moscow in the past week.
China’s participation alongside Russia and Belarus comes days after the US said it would no longer mediate between Russia and Ukraine, leaving the two countries to work out how to end the war. The US is also engaged in a trade war with Beijing.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has proposed a three-day ceasefire with Ukraine around the 9 May celebration – one of the most important days in the Russian calendar. The 72-hour ceasefire is the second announced by Moscow in recent weeks, after it declared a 30-hour Easter Sunday truce - which Kyiv and its European allies accused it of breaching.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is also expected to visit Moscow and appear alongside Mr Putin at Red Square later this week. Beijing said the two leaders are set to engage in “strategic communication” during his official visit.
"During the talks, the main issues of further development of relations of comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction, as well as current issues on the international and regional agenda will be discussed," a statement from the Kremlin said.
Several other national leaders are expected at the celebrations, including the presidents of Brazil and Serbia, and the prime minister of Slovakia.
This is not the first time China has sent an honour guard to Russia. However, this will be the first such participation by China’s honour guard in Belarus. Earlier, China’s honour guard had participated in Belarus’s annual Independence Day parade in 2018.
Beijing, a close diplomatic ally of Moscow, has not condemned the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Last month, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had captured two Chinese men fighting for Russia in the east, potentially threatening a fragile peace effort in the three-year-old war.
The case was the first publicly announced instance of Chinese nationals captured fighting for Russia in Ukraine. China's foreign ministry objected to Zelensky’s remarks that more Chinese citizens were at the frontline alongside Russians, calling them "groundless".
The involvement of Chinese troops appears to be the most significant participation of foreign fighters in Moscow’s war effort since 12,000 North Koreans assisted Russian troops in Kursk – where they recently reclaimed large areas of land from Ukraine.
A major reason for the high-profile celebration this year was that “some countries have tried to distort the post-war history and order” through unilateral sanctions and tariff wars, Zhao Long, deputy director of the Institute for International Strategic and Security Studies at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies told the South China Morning Post.
On Sunday, the Russian state news agency RIA cited Mr Putin, in a documentary film aired to mark 25 years since his first inauguration as Russian president, as saying that Russia's relations with China were: "truly strategic in nature, deep-seated".
"Our national interests coincide," it quoted him as saying.
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