Friday, Feb. 24, marks one year since Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Ahead of the one-year anniversary, Russian President Vladimir Putin met Wednesday with China's top diplomat, Wang Yi.

Dakota Wood, a senior research fellow in defense programs at The Heritage Foundation's Center for National Defense, says the visit wasn't that "out of the ordinary, in terms of the relations that exist between various powers." (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

However, "the unusual part would be this very overt effort between China, [the] Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, to work more closely and overtly, very explicitly with Vladimir Putin, Moscow, Russia as a whole," Wood says. "So, is it an alliance? I don't know that. ... It's an alliance in practice, as opposed to some kind of a formal alliance that we saw in World War I, World War II amongst Axis powers."

Wood adds: 

So, from the perspective of Moscow and Beijing, isn't it better to join forces in a sense such that together, operating in our own spheres, it causes more problems for the United States, who is increasingly unable to address two major competitors at the same time, keeping us off balance, dividing attention, and really putting a stressor on the resources we have available. 

Wood joins today's episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss reporting that the U.S. is increasing its troop presence in Taiwan, lessons from the war in Ukraine, and the potential for China to supply Russia with weaponry. 

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