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We seem to be at a juncture where Putin is certainly continuing to try to amass the force that he would need to

do to really go at Kiev and the other large cities if in the process of doing that. It's not going well and they were to consider using chemical weapons.

My sense is that that would probably be a dividing line for the Chinese, although it wasn't in Syria.

Chris Johnson is the CEO of the China Strategies Group. He is a former senior CIA China analyst and he is the former head of the China program

at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Chris has been on our show many times before and he joins us today to talk about how the Chinese are reacting to Russia's attack on Ukraine.

We'll be right back with that discussion after a word from our sponsor. I'm Michael Morel and this is Intelligence Matters.

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Chris, welcome again. You and Sumitari are competing for the most frequent guests on intelligence matters.

I meant to count this morning to see if I was in the lead but I didn't get around to.

Chris, we are living through a very difficult time in Ukraine. The intimidation of the Russian military build up, the invasion itself, which we're still going through,

the use of some of the most brutal attacks by the Russian military. You and I are now going to look at that all from the perspective of China, which I think is incredibly important.

Maybe the place to begin Chris is the broad, Russia-China relationship before Ukraine. How would you have described it? What was it based on? How do you think about that?

Sure. Well, I think I would have described it as a partnership of mutual interest and a partnership of mutual grievances.

Note that I didn't say that it was a marriage of convenience, which I think is too dismissive of what's been happening in the relationship certainly over the last decade, maybe even a little bit longer ago than that.

But more importantly, I think in the current context of what we're seeing with Russia and Ukraine, I also didn't describe it as a new access, as certainly the Trump administration implied in its national security strategy in 2017 by describing the Chinese and the Russians as sort of on the same level in terms of our new strategic competitors.

And interestingly and perhaps troublingly, explicitly now being shaped by some in the body and administration, or at least it seems they're trying to convince us that it is a new access perhaps all of the old access powers.

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