US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, better known for her infamous role in encouraging Ukraine’s 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Color Revolution, made an unacceptable demand of China on Thursday. She said that “We are calling on Beijing to use its influence with Moscow to urge diplomacy”. This follows the fake news that circulated in the US-led Western mainstream media last week alleging that Chinese President Xi Jinping asked his Russian counterpart not to attack Ukraine.

These two developments draw attention to one of the most prominent fallacies of Western strategic thinking, namely that the Chinese-Russian Strategic Partnership isn’t one of equals. According to Western so-called “experts”, China “dominates” this relationship and Russia is the “junior partner”. This false narrative is pushed for purely self-interested reasons related to meddling in their unbreakable partnership.

What the West wants to do is divide these two major countries that jointly serve as engines of the emerging multipolar world order. They hope to sow the seeds of mutual suspicion in order to subsequently exploit them for the purpose of provoking tensions. This is nothing but a bad political fantasy that has no semblance whatsoever to reality. Nevertheless, it’s continually being pushed, most recently by Nuland, which requires further analysis of the West’s supplementary motivations.

Since there’s no chance of dividing the Chinese-Russian Strategic Partnership, the ulterior reason in propagating this weaponized information warfare narrative is to manipulate global perceptions. The US failed to contain either China or Russia and now it wants to “save face” before the Western public. To that end, it’s spinning tall tales about their supposedly unequal partnership by claiming that China has the potential to influence Russia as if the latter wasn’t the fully sovereign major country that it truly is.

There might be an additional motivation as well. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov revealed on Friday during an interview with his country’s radio stations that “I do not exclude that somebody would like to provoke military actions [around Ukraine]”. He added that “the regime in Kiev does not control the majority of these armed people” assembling along the line of control, fearing that “someone there could snap” and even provoke hostilities if they simply have a psychological breakdown due to stress.

Some observers are worried that the US will either encourage Kiev to provoke a third round of civil war hostilities during the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics or leverage its extensive network of influence within that country to have its military-intelligence assets do that on their own if Ukraine won’t. This isn’t without precedent either since the US encouraged former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to attack South Ossetia and kill Russian peacekeepers during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

That prompted a decisive Russian intervention aimed at forcing Georgia to peace, which swiftly succeeded in just eight days’ time. Even so, however, it was an unfortunate distraction from the Olympic Games. Considering how much the US wants to spoil the upcoming ones next month, it can’t be discounted that it’ll attempt something similar in Ukraine to prompt the same Russian response for that very same reason.

If that’s the strategic calculation at play, then there’s a more nefarious motive behind spreading fake news about the Chinese-Russian Strategic Partnership than was initially thought. In such a scenario, the US-led Western mainstream media would predictably claim that Russia “ruined” the Olympics “again”, not their own country that provoked the 2008 Russian-Georgian War and perhaps also a forthcoming Russian-Ukrainian one as well.

After introducing that weaponized fake news narrative into the global discourse, they’d then probably double down on their efforts to manipulate global perceptions about the Chinese-Russian Strategic Partnership by claiming that China is “upset” at Russia or something along those lines. None of that would be true, of course, but it’s likely to be the next phase of their joint information warfare campaign against those two major powers.

It obviously wouldn’t succeed in influencing their rock-solid strategic partnership, but it would still be an unwelcome distraction. All of this, it should be remembered, is being done from a position of desperation due to the US’ declining unipolar hegemony. It’s losing control of Eurasia for the first time in decades and that’s because the Chinese-Russian Strategic Partnership is revolutionizing geostrategic and geo-economic affairs there. No amount of fake news can change that promising multipolar reality.