Four warships, three Chinese and one Russian, took the long way around Japan last week. The People’s Liberation Army Navy sent the cruiser Anshan, the destroyer Kaifeng and the fleet oiler Kekexilihu; the Russian Navy sent the corvette Rezkiy. Japanese surveillance spotted them near Cape Inubo, on Honshu’s eastern shore, and then roughly 300 km (about 186 miles) southeast of Cape Nosappu, on Hokkaido. Two Japanese destroyers and a patrol aircraft followed them the whole way.
The patrols have run every year since 2021, and each year the choreography grows bolder. This year’s leg began in Qingdao, after the Maritime Interaction exercise, as Russia calls it, or Joint Sea, as China calls it, which ran in the Chinese port from July 6 to 13. Days after the exercise ended, Kaifeng conducted a live-fire drill inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone near Okinotori Island, firing machine guns in waters Japan considers its own. Tokyo protested. In late June, Chinese H-6 and Russian Tu-95 bombers flew a joint long-distance mission into the Philippine Sea, threading the strait between Okinawa and Miyako.
None of this is a secret. It is the point. Analysts read the patrol as proof that the barrier Washington calls the first island chain does not confine them, and that Moscow can still project power while fighting a war in Ukraine. The message is addressed to Tokyo and to Washington, and it is written in the sea lanes themselves: this is what the two powers can do together, annually, without asking anyone’s permission.
Japan has stopped pretending otherwise. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said the Self-Defense Forces would closely monitor the military movements of China and Russia with strong interest, and the scramble statistics tell the real story. In the first quarter of the fiscal year, Japanese fighters were scrambled 181 times, up 24 from the same period last year. Of those, 139 were against Chinese aircraft and drones, 42 against Russian. A Russian surveillance aircraft flew the length of Japan’s Pacific coast in the same week as the warships.
The trend line matters more than any single sighting. The 2025 patrol threaded La Perouse Strait into the Sea of Okhotsk and paused at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, deep in Russia’s Pacific backyard, before heading home. In 2024 the two navies sailed together twice, once from Jeju to the South China Sea, once from Sakhalin through the Philippine Sea. In 2023 the patrol reached Alaska and the Aleutians. This year’s version added a live-fire drill in a disputed economic zone. The routes reach farther each time, the exercises get more ambitious, and the two armed forces are learning to operate together in ways that were unthinkable a decade ago.
The patrol also serves Moscow’s purposes at a moment when the war in Ukraine has consumed its attention and much of its fleet. Showing up off Hokkaido every summer is how Russia signals that it remains a Pacific power with ships and money to spare. For Beijing, the joint operation is cheaper than acting alone: Russia brings experience of northern waters, China brings the bulk of the tonnage, and both get a rehearsal for operations neither wants to run by itself. That division of labor is the real news, more than any single ship’s course.
What the patrol cannot do is change the map. The ships pass through international waters, and Japan’s response is surveillance, not confrontation. But the ritual itself is the message: every summer, the two navies circle the archipelago, test the edges of Japan’s patience, and go home. Tokyo watches, counts the scrambles, and files another protest. The circle gets wider every year, and nothing suggests it will get smaller.