Russia is increasingly dependent on China, North Korea and Iran as its war against Ukraine strains resources, potentially undermining global “non-proliferation norms” and enhancing disinformation meant to interfere with coming elections in America and other countries, a top US intelligence official warned lawmakers on Monday.
“Growing cooperation and willingness to exchange aid in military, economic, political and intelligence matters [among the four countries] enhances their individual capabilities,” said Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, in testimony supporting her office’s Annual Threat Assessment, a summary of current threats to American national security.
The hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee also brought as witnesses FBI Director Christopher Wray, CIA Director William Burns and National Security Agency Director Timothy Haugh. A closed-door hearing was scheduled to follow the unclassified public portion.
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“Russia’s need for support in the context of Ukraine has forced it to grant some long-time concessions to China, North Korea and Iran, with the potential to undermine, among other things, long-held non-proliferation norms,” Haines said, without specifying what technologies she was most concerned about.
Burns stated that President Vladimir Putin was facing dire consequences, militarily and economically, even as the Russian leader appears convinced he holds the upper hand in a costly war that has just entered its third year.
Russia has seen “315,000-plus dead and wounded, four times the casualties that the Soviet Union suffered in a decade of war in Afghanistan, the destruction of something on the order of two thirds of their pre-war tank inventory, and long-term economic consequences ... fast making Russia the economic vassal of China”, Burns said.
Monday’s hearing and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s most recent threat assessment underscored the extent to which Washington’s intel community sees economic and technological cooperation between the four countries that Haines identified undermining American stability.
As often happens in such settings, popular social-media platform TikTok was cited as a possible vector for societal division over its alleged subservience to China’s Communist Party, which the company, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has denied.
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Wray answered in the affirmative when asked by Florida’s Marco Rubio, the ranking Republican on the committee, whether TikTok would need to follow any Chinese government orders from ByteDance “to put out videos that make Americans fight with each other or spread conspiracy theories and get them at each other’s throats”.
“I would just add that ... the different kinds of influence operations you’re describing are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant,” Wray said.
TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi has denied in testimony before American lawmakers that the company has ever shared US user data with the Chinese government. It has spent US$1.5 billion in an effort to restrict access to users’ data in the US in coordination with the American government.
Differences over aid for Ukraine, which has been blocked by Republicans in the House of Representatives, connected back to China in Monday’s hearing, with Democrats and some of Monday’s witnesses warning that threats posed by Beijing would intensify if support for Ukraine stayed stalled.
US President Joe Biden has urged the House to follow the Senate’s passage last month of a US$95 billion package that includes funding for Israel’s military and Taiwan. Some US$60 billion of that amount would help Ukraine restock depleted ammunition supplies and weapons.
Republican lawmakers have made support for Taiwan and Israel a higher priority, often warning about Beijing’s military build-up in recent years.
Rubio framed the aid as a choice.
“The Chinese hope for [the US] is one of two things: A, we deplete ourselves in Ukraine and/or the Middle East, particularly Ukraine, or B, we can run and then they can go around the world and say, ‘see, America’s weak’,” he said.
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“They have a plan for either outcome, which makes it challenging for us as we decide what to do here.”
Democratic senator Michael Bennet of Colorado pushed back on that assessment.
“You hear people in this building say that the United States of America has to give up on our support for Ukraine in actual conflict with Vladimir Putin and actual conflict with Russia because of the fear that we will not be able to afford some plausible but nevertheless theoretical conflict with China in the future,” Bennet said.
In response to Bennet’s follow-up question on whether the US was capable of handling “our commitments with respect to Ukraine and Nato and be able to deter Beijing”, Burns said: “We’re entirely capable.”
More from South China Morning Post:
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- Russia and China compare notes on ‘military use of artificial intelligence’
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