I know, they have been trying to pull Russia into this mess. If Russia gets accidentally mixed up in this conundrum, and the situation cooks up, we are probably looking at WW-III.
The fact that China is trying to co-opt Russia is totally unforgivable. Russia should turn the other cheek and spurn China's devious advances. China is playing a wicked game, and Russia should make the choice to try to defuse the situation and walk away.
I disagree with your assessment of Russian innocence in its cooperation with Chinese desire to set Asian security concerns on Chinese terms. Russia is knowingly, not accidentally, getting "mixed up".
We are already in WWIII now; it began in 1991. The active part of our response simply had a twelve year delay - no thanks to France and Clinton's desire to not oppose France on more quickly settling up with Sadaam and playing diplomatic games with other Muslim dictators. In time, history will bring out the true extent of actual Iraqi connections with and background support for Al Queda.
China is not co-opting Russia. It is looking for partners and to the extent that Russia is cooperating with China, that cooperation is a willing and conscious choice, with no illusions about Chinese intentions. Russia is playing the same game as France - anything to contradict the only "superpower".
Russia is a mobocracy and its foreign affairs are directed to pure and total nationalistic economic concerns to support and strengthen the Russian mob created oligarchs that now control Russia's economy through the KGB.
I have said for years, the one thing that Gorbachev was right about was that his country was not ready for democracy. It did not have the instutitions, history and culture to make it work. He wanted to implement perestroika and glasnost gradually, allowing time to create national democratic based institutions and allowing the functing of those institutions to provide a history and culture of democratic practice.
The politburo tried to replace Gorby because they did not want to loose their power and the new democrats did not want to wait for glasnost and perestroika to change the national culture. The only ones who were organized, who had their own national network, who had connections with the party apparatchiks and the levers of government, who had favors owed to them by party and government officials and who were ready and able to move into the power vacumn was ......the Russian mobs. The KGB needs them and they need the KGB. They are each others base of power. Nothing can get done in the economy without the mob and the KGB can replace one mobster with another if its suits Putin. Nothing in that power equation has changed since Gorby fell. It has made the Russian people willing to question the "democracy" and "free markets" they are told they have. It is making the Russian people willing to accept a new revolution and a new dictatorship who will throw out the mob oligarchy - and capitalism and freedom along with it. Think if the old Soviet Union without the ideology and you have a Russian version of Nazi Germany.