Authoritarian Learning: The Russia-PRC Convergence in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has transformed the drone from a reconnaissance tool into the centerpiece of twenty-first-century warfare. What began as a small-scale improvisation on both sides has become a proving ground for mass production, electronic warfare, and automated targeting. In this environment, the partnership between Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged as a defining feature of the conflict—one that fuses battlefield adaptation with industrial scale.

Industrial Convergence and Authoritarian Division of Labor

Russia’s war has revealed the complementarity of two systems: Moscow’s improvisational battlefield learning and Beijing’s industrial precision. A de facto division of labor has emerged—Russia experiments with saturation warfare using cheap drones, while the PRC transforms those battlefield lessons into an industrialized, autonomous swarm doctrine. On the ground in Ukraine, the sheer loss of drones demonstrates the effectiveness of mass over precision; in PRC simulations for a Taiwan scenario, that principle is being converted into orchestrated strikes and algorithm-driven targeting.

The PLA is absorbing these insights. The PLA officers study Russian failures in electronic-warfare protection and adaptive coordination as negative examples, while replicating Ukraine-style saturation attacks in domestic trials. Since 2020, PRC conglomerates such as CETC and NORINCO have launched hundreds of fixed-wing drones in coordinated formations to simulate the electromagnetic chaos of Eastern Europe’s battlefield. This cycle of recurrent experimentation—Russia improvising under combat conditions while the PRC refines those lessons in controlled simulations. It binds their learning processes into a shared, mutually reinforcing system.

The Global Drone Supply Chain as a Strategic Weapon

Beyond their battlefield applications, these lessons underpin the PRC’s emergence as a global drone superpower—using industrial capacity as a strategic instrument. The PRC’s drone exports reveal how industrial scale becomes geopolitical leverage. OEC trade data show that in 2023, Beijing exported approximately $1.83 billion in drones across all categories, ranking as the world’s leading supplier of large remote-controlled UAVs between 25 and 150 kilograms. Although this segment is small within the PRC’s overall export portfolio, it illustrates dominance in a critical sector that reinforces both civilian and military demand.

The PRC has delivered more than 200 combat drones to seventeen countries since 2013, accounting for roughly one-quarter of global sales. Low prices and flexible financing make PRC models, such as the CH-4 and Wing Loong II, affordable to authoritarian clients from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. The result is not only market dominance but also a dispersed network of test environments: Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, and Myanmar have all served as real-world laboratories for PRC UAVs. Feedback from these conflicts informs Beijing’s manufacturing refinements, mirroring how Russia’s war in Ukraine now supplies operational data at scale.

By 2025, the drone economy in the PRC is projected to exceed 200 billion yuan in annual output, sustained by both state investment and global dependency. By pairing global reach with domestic scale, Beijing has turned drones into tools of economic coercion.

Export Controls as an Authoritarian Policy Tool

Beijing’s 2024 to 2025 export-control expansion allegedly sought to prevent “non-peaceful use.” However, in practice, it functioned as an “iron curtain for drones.” Sales to Ukraine, the U.S., and Europe were curtailed, while shipments to Russia flowed through intermediaries and joint ventures on Russian soil. PRC-made navigation chips, optics, and batteries are still present in the wreckage of the Russian UAV recovered by Ukrainian forces. NATO consequently labeled the PRC a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war.

Such selective enforcement demonstrates Beijing’s capacity to shape access to critical components and influence conflict dynamics. Ukraine, once the largest buyer of DJI Mavic quadcopters, lost access after Beijing’s September 2024 restrictions, whereas Russian procurement continued through front companies. In 2023 alone, the PRC exported roughly $14.5 million in drones to Russia and barely $200,000 to Ukraine. With the PRC controlling roughly 80 percent of the global drone market, this dominance grants Beijing potential leverage to favor sides in future conflicts—particularly in a Taiwan contingency where export controls could delay or disrupt adversary resupply chains. In such a scenario, the PRC’s control over key drone components, sensors, and navigation systems could serve as a form of industrial deterrence, allowing Beijing to slow or selectively block Western resupply efforts without direct confrontation.

In 2025, Beijing’s sanctions on thirteen US firms and new limits on key components—motors, batteries, and navigation modules—disrupted even Western manufacturing, underscoring the PRC’s capacity to weaponize supply chains. The claim here isn’t proven coercion but demonstrated leverage that Beijing could exercise in a Taiwan contingency.

Hidden Factories: The Russia-PRC Drone Nexus

Investigations have uncovered the concrete machinery behind this convergence. Documents reviewed by reporters show that the Russian state firm IEMZ Kupol, a subsidiary of Almaz-Antey, has collaborated with PRC partners to develop and test long-range attack drones such as the Garpiya-3. Some units were flight-tested in the PRC before delivery to Kupol’s facilities in Izhevsk, and at least seven PRC-made UAVs—including G3 models—were invoiced in yuan. Plans for an “Advanced UAV Research and Manufacturing Base” in Xinjiang describe an 80-hectare site capable of producing 800 drones annually.

Additionally, Kupol received one-way attack drones from Sichuan AEE and Hunan Haotianyi, with PRC engineers repeatedly traveling to Russia for assembly and testing. These exchanges confirm a physical presence of PRC specialists on Russian soil, blurring the line between dual-use trade and direct military cooperation.

Beijing Xichao International Technology and Trade disguised exports of L550E engines as “industrial refrigeration units,” routing them through Russian intermediaries SMP-138 and LIBSS to reach Kupol. The concealment allowed Russia to triple production of Garpiya drones from 2,000 in 2024 to 6,000 in 2025, while Western sanctions remained formally intact.

Taken together, these findings reveal an authoritarian production model without borders. PRC firms provide design and components, Russian factories assemble under fire, and both profit from deniability. However, this cooperation remains far from frictionless. PRC firms, particularly state-owned conglomerates, remain cautious of secondary sanctions and reputational risk. As a result, much of the cooperation operates through intermediaries and nominally civilian subsidiaries, while several projects were already cancelled.

PRC’s Military Ambition and Civil-Military Fusion

Under Xi Jinping’s directive that “future wars will be uncrewed and intelligent,” the PLA has integrated drones into every mission domain—ISR, strike, logistics, and electronic warfare. The 14th Five-Year Plan institutionalized this drive, while state champions AVIC, CASC, NORINCO, and CETC poured resources into autonomous systems. Exercises around Taiwan between 2022 and 2025 featured loitering munitions, swarm tactics, and “mothership” concepts deploying hundreds of smaller UAVs.

By 2025, the PLA’s testing reached new milestones: CETC launched 200 drones simultaneously; NORINCO developed amphibious-landing swarms; and the Jiu Tian SS-UAV demonstrated a 25-meter “drone mothership” releasing 150 loitering munitions. These programs link directly to Russia’s battlefield experimentation, translating observed improvisation into structured doctrine. CNA calls this “attack-defense fusion”: combining algorithmic control with saturation assault to overwhelm adversary air defenses.

Beyond copying Russian tactics, PRC strategists are also studying the war’s defensive lessons—especially how traditional anti-drone systems fall short. PLA research institutes are now focusing on developing multi-level, AI-driven defenses that combine radar, jamming, and directed-energy weapons to counter drone swarms. Analysts note ongoing debate within the PLA over whether artificial intelligence should guide decisions or simply assist coordination, revealing a more cautious approach than often assumed. Beijing is also testing cross-domain operations that link aerial, naval, and ground drones to sustain combat in contested environments. Rather than treating Ukraine as a model to follow, PRC planners are using it as a live laboratory for building their own version of intelligent, resilient, and multi-domain warfare.

However, not all of Russia’s battlefield innovations translate easily to the PRC. The PLA’s centralized command system and strict control of information limit the kind of rapid, bottom-up experimentation that drove Russia’s drone tactics in Ukraine. While PRC planners are skilled at integrating complex systems, the rigid hierarchy can slow real-time adaptation and discourage initiative. As a result, the PLA’s learning process is thorough and systematic—but far less improvisational.

Authoritarian Learning and Global Export Ecologies

Beyond the battlefield, PRC’s drone expansion mirrors its export of digital surveillance systems. Firms like Hikvision, Dahua, and Huawei integrate UAV-based monitoring into “public security management,” exporting a governance model rooted in control. These dual-use exports create authoritarian shared technological standards that bind regimes together.

As was mentioned before, over the past decade, Beijing has delivered drones to 17 countries, most of which are authoritarian. Each sale extends political alignment and provides empirical data. Saudi Arabia’s Wing Loong IIs have flown 8,000 combat sorties in Yemen. Iraq’s 260 CH-4B operations against ISIS, and Myanmar’s use of PRC drones for domestic repression all feed back into PRC research and development on targeting and reliability. The spread of loose rules, such as unrestricted strikes and little oversight, undermines global norms and turns drone warfare into a tool for regime survival.

In this sense, the PRC’s foreign clients, like Russia, serve as extensions of its research architecture: they supply data and political cover while Beijing refines capability.

The Feedback Loop in Ukraine

PRC technicians now work alongside Russian engineers on assembly lines inside Russia, while PRC officers tour frontlines to study operations. Ukraine’s intelligence estimates that 80 percent of electronics inside Russian drones originate in the PRC. Joint Russian-Iranian-PRC engineering teams are already experimenting with fiber-optic drones resistant to jamming, enabling Moscow to escalate production toward 1,000 Shahed-type launches per day.

Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan describes this as: “The Russians have learned to learn better and faster the longer the war has gone on.” Implying that Russia, the PRC, Iran, and North Korea are an ecosystem in which exchanging battlefield lessons, engineering data, and sanction escape techniques occur. What began as a Russian adaptation has evolved into a global machine for authoritarian innovation.

Strategic Implications for the West

The convergence of Russian experience and PRC scale represents a systemic threat. Russia demonstrates how attrition warfare through drones can exhaust defenses, while the PRC demonstrates how to industrialize it. Both regimes exploit centralized decision-making to compress the learning cycle that constrains democracies. The result is: Russia provides combat validation, and the PRC provides mass production and data analytics. Such a partnership merges economic policy with kinetic effect. By manipulating component access, Beijing dictates operational pace without overt intervention. 

The outcome is a new theater of competition where industrial policy is weaponized as effectively as missiles. However, this partnership, same as any, has clear limits. Beijing’s caution over sanctions and global markets often clashes with Moscow’s urgent wartime needs. The PRC supplies key parts but avoids direct military support, making the relationship pragmatic rather than built on trust.

For the U.S. and its allies, the message is clear: authoritarian powers are turning drone warfare into a contest of cost and scale. 

Close the cost gap: Western drones remain far more expensive than their Russian or PRC counterparts. A single U.S. MQ-9 Reaper costs over $30 million, while PRC and Russian FPV or loitering drones can cost only a few thousand dollars each, while achieving similar battlefield effects. To stay competitive, the U.S. should prioritize producing smaller, cheaper systems in large quantities, learning from Ukraine’s model of mass production and rapid adaptation.

Rebuild industrial independence. The U.S. and NATO remain dependent on PRC-made components such as batteries, sensors, and flight controllers. Boosting domestic manufacturing and allied co-production of these parts would reduce vulnerability to export controls and supply disruptions. Targeted subsidies, dual-use industrial zones, and defense procurement reforms can accelerate this shift.

Strengthen NATO’s eastern-flank resilience. Recent experience showed that the threat from Russia’s drone ecosystem is most pointed in Eastern Europe, the U.S. should help frontline allies—Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. They should expand the joint production of low-cost UAVs and counter-drone systems. Sharing designs, manufacturing tools, and AI-based detection software across NATO could create an integrated defense network that reflects Ukrainian improvisation on the battlefield but with alliance-wide scale and coordination.

Together, these steps would help the West compete on both price and quantity while reinforcing the industrial backbone of its security partnerships.

A New Architecture of Control

At its core, the Russia-PRC drone relationship shows how authoritarianism thrives on feedback, not ideology. It is an adaptive, data-driven partnership connecting laboratories, factories, and battlefields. Drones, surveillance platforms, and export controls form its connective tissue. Through selective enforcement and shared experimentation, Beijing and Moscow have built a parallel technological order that turns interdependence into coercion. The war in Ukraine, far from isolating Russia, has accelerated this process, turning Europe’s largest battlefield into the world’s most systematic classroom for authoritarian modernization. 

Views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the views of GSSR, Georgetown University, or any other entity. Image Credit: Unsplash