A Russian naval vessel is moored to a berth at a pier in Vladivostok, east Russia. Photograph: Xinhua, Bai Yunfeng/AP
On Thursday, Russia and China, once bitter rivals for leadership of the communist world, will start their first ever joint military exercises involving 10,000 troops.
The two countries, which almost came to blows in past territorial disputes, have insisted that the manoeuvres are not aimed at any third country and are designed to reinforce the growing trust between them.
The scenario for the war game is that ethnic conflict erupts in an unspecified third country on the Shandong peninsula in China that triggers terrorist attacks. China and Russia are given a mandate by the UN to intervene.
All this sounds fine. But why, asks Alexander Golts an analyst writing in the Moscow Times, are long-distance Tu-22M bombers and two strategic Tu-95 bombers taking part as well as diesel-powered submarines?
For Golts the involvement of long-distance warplanes means the war game should also be seen as an exercise by Russia and China to block any other country's navy from reaching the conflict zone.
"In this case, the peacekeeping mission is transformed into something resembling a standard operation to take over the third country's territory," he writes.
No prizes as to which country China has in mind here - Taiwan. Following on from this line of thinking, the navy that would be blocked from coming to Taiwan's aid would be America's.
But if China has Taiwan in mind, that may not be necessarily the case for Russia. Dmitry Kormilitsyn, an analyst at Chinacom, a Moscow think tank that studies China and Russian-Chinese relations, tells the Washington Post that Russia is more interested in pushing back the very active US presence in central Asia.
Russia was never thrilled with the presence of US bases on its doorstep in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, to support American military operations in Afghanistan. Russia belongs to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which includes China and the central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The group recently called on the US to set a timetable to withdraw its forces from bases in the area. The Uzbek authorities later gave US forces 180 days to pull out, after the US criticised the Uzbek government for a crackdown on demonstrators in the city of Andijan in May, that reportedly left hundreds dead.
So how does the US see this week's war games. No surprises that American conservatives see it as an ominous development.
Peter Brookes, a fellow at the rightwing Heritage Foundation, writes: "These unprecedented military exercises don't make a formal Beijing-Moscow alliance inevitable. But they represent a new, more intimate phase in the Sino-Russian relationship. And China's growing political/economic clout mated with Russia's military might would make for a potentially potent anti-American bloc."
- Additional reporting by Kiri Kankhwende
