Bear In The Woods.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Foreign Affairs: Russia's meddling in the Ukrainian elections and its collaboration with China indicate its days as a threat to freedom and democracy may not be over.

Russia and China will hold their first joint military exercise this year, a key event between two countries whose border once saw 700,000 Soviet troops facing 1 million Chinese soldiers. The announcement came just after Christmas, during a visit to Beijing by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov presumably to discuss Russia's ongoing arms sales to the communist giant.

Bonds between the two former foes have been growing for some time. On July 16, 2001, the presidents of Russia and China signed a Treaty for Good Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation. Among its goals: the offsetting of U.S. "hegemonism."

It's a pact eerily reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, and the first such agreement between the two powers since Mao Tse-tung signed a treaty with Joseph Stalin in 1950, just four months before the outbreak of the Korean War.

Ivanov, who was returning from his second visit to Beijing in just three months, made a point of emphasizing that Russian forces would include "state-of-the-art weapons" from its navy and air force. The implications of these unprecedented exercises near American interests in the Pacific, particularly considering Beijing's designs on Taiwan, are enormous.

China has become the Russian arms industry's No. 1 customer, and is expected to buy $2 billion in weapons this year. They include two destroyers armed with supersonic, nuclear-capable SS-N-22 anti-ship missiles, warships specifically designed to take on American carrier groups like those that might be needed to defend Taiwan.

Russia's arms industry ...