Putin is planning for a large scale war across Europe. Putin is expecting China to soon wage a similar war - and that could occur anytime

When the advisor to the Ukrainian government, Mikhaylo Podolyak, made his statement worrying about Russia's intention to scale back from original invasion, he had also mentioned that the Russian MP from Moscow requested Russia to "denazify" other countries like Poland, Moldova and the Baltics on his tweet. While how far real it is is much for debate, Podolyak's tweet actually struck to our mind: Putin is planning for a greater war, and for more destruction, probably all of Europe.

But while the rest of Europe is worrying about being embroiled to war, another sign that China is planning for a future war has been ongoing. Like Russia, China is led by a powerful dictator, Xi Jinping, who has accumulated power similar to that of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and maybe even more powerful than those two because he inherited a country, whose economy is standing 2nd in the world and deeply integrated globally, with a military far more powerful than that of Russia.

Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the free world has united in term of boycotting everything Russian. Economic sanctions have been imposed, including against Putin's close aides and oligarchs. Russian regime has been also hit with its banks completely crippled off from SWIFT system, resulting in Russians unable to get money out of their banks. Its stock exchange closed for over a month before a sham open was taken. The economic and political sanctions are far more severe than expected, as it reeled the Russian economy and its war machine, to the point Putin and Lavrov have to spread lies and disinformation to avoid recession effect.

As the war in Ukraine didn't go in according plan and Russia turning to a pariah, Putin has become more and more desperate, moving troops from various poorer parts of Russia to the frontline, as well as including mercenaries from the Middle East and Africa. Putin is also trying to woo uncertain allies like Iran, Nicaragua, Serbia, Mali, Central African Republic, Taliban's Afghanistan, Cuba, Pakistan, Venezuela and Myanmar to provide greater supports for Russia and to show that Russia is not isolated. By far, only Eritrea, North Korea, Belarus and Syria appeared to appreciate Putin's war message - all are despotic governments.

But Putin may have more to expect from potential supports from China, which has been, for now, very reluctant. China has unveiled a strong alliance with Russia when Putin visited China to meet Xi Jinping in early February, in which relationship was underlined with "no limit". Beijing was accused of knowing about the invasion of Ukraine but decided to side with Russia anyway, expecting that Putin would conquer Ukraine in just three days and to signal a warning for anyone wanting to side with the West. Like Putin, Xi Jinping also used the disastrous American evacuation of Afghanistan and political collapse of this country to the Taliban as well to tell how Ukraine will collapse immediately.

However, Ukrainian resistance has been a shock to Beijing. China initially expected to win in just one to three days, now the war has really bogged Putin's imperialist dream to a damned stall. Putin's main object of conquering Kyiv was undone, Russian military suffered high casualties in just a few weeks. Despite having succeeded in limiting these casualties in recent days, the staggering deaths of over 7,000-15,000 troops by estimation, is too high, equalling to the Soviet casualties in Afghanistan.

China has been trying to understand how Putin's calculation turned into a quagmire. Russian military's inability to destroy Ukrainian force, failure to achieve air superiority, and a string of violent decimation of cities, have only galvanised more and more Ukrainians to hate Russia, and the desire to kill Putin has only grown. Moreover, the unity of Western allies, while far from perfect, is another disbelief for Beijing, since China, like Russia after all, asserted that the West is weakened following its failure in Afghanistan.

China has signalled attempts to provide economic aids for Russia, but it has not provided any military hardware for Moscow, while Chinese companies have tried to avoid direct contact with Russian counterparts in fear of suffering secondary retaliation. Beijing is walking in a tight rope: it cannot openly endorse Russian invasion, but it cannot side with the West because of its unlimited partnership with Russia - Chinese internet has cheered Russia against Ukraine. Yet China also has some level of cooperation with Ukraine, notably when China's first aircraft carrier was bought from the country.

Within that tight rope, however, Putin is likely to pressuring China. The Russian despot is trying to galvanise his Chinese allies that his war could not be done if China didn't join the common bandwagon. Putin is also using this to demonstrate that Xi must wage war a similar in Asia. Putin wants China to do the same based on his assumption that Xi Jinping, like him, also shared a similar syndrome of restoring imperial greatness, and the West is responsible for trying to dismantle China.

It's not clear will China heed to Putin's echo of restoring empires, but clearly Xi Jinping is dreaming for such a thing. If Russia can conquer Ukraine and bring it back to control, it'll embolden Xi to change the map. Varied reports about how China will invade next have been made, with the most feasible scenario of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, an island 100 miles away from China and not even seen by Beijing as an independent state, leave alone a sovereign nation like Ukraine. Yet, a less popular scenario also implied that China might want to invade Vietnam to show how improved the Chinese troops are than the 1979 war. In both cases toward Vietnam and Taiwan, China both sees these nations as renegade countries, the former revolted and freed itself from China in 938, while the latter is stuck with the One-China consensus.

Anyway, we will get the point: if Putin can successfully encourage Xi to go to war, the Chinese dictator's ego, which has been growing more and more in tenacity due to his feeling of China's increasing superiority and his interests vested from his personal kinship with Putin, likely to spark the World War III. We must differentiate Chinese and Russian militaries; while the Russian Armed Forces has been modernised but still demonstrated a poor performance which enraged Putin, the People's Liberation Army of China is far more powerful, more modern, more organised and employing more sophisticated weapons than that of Russia's. A separate plan to deal with the growing muscle of the Chinese military must be underlined.

Let's hope that a third World War won't break out, since nuclear weapon is now a reality and several countries have already obtained this weapon. Putin's attempt to encourage Xi to go to war must not become a reality.