MOSCOW – Highlighting growing military ties between Moscow and Beijing, Russia and China will hold an unprecedented joint military exercise later this month that will see nearly 10,000 troops taking part in land, air, and naval war games.

Officials announced yesterday that the exercise, dubbed Peace Mission 2005, will be held August 18-25 in Russia’s Far East and on China’s Shandong Peninsula.

The maneuvers are another sign of warming relations between the two Cold War-era rivals, who since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union have pledged to support a multipolar world in opposition to American domination of international affairs.

Most worrying for America, according to an independent analyst, Pavel Felgenhauer, is that Chinese interest in the exercise seems focused on its eventual acquisition of more powerful weapons.

“For the Chinese, the goal is to build better relations with [Russia’s] top brass to make it easier in negotiations on weapons transfers. The Chinese have quite a shopping list,” he said.

America has pushed hard to limit arms sales to China, especially strategic, long-range weapons. Last month, the Defense Department warned the European Union that lifting its arms embargo against China – imposed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown – would bring “serious and numerous” consequences.

The Chinese are hoping this month’s exercises will smooth the way for the purchase of Russian nuclear submarines and long-range bombers, such as Tu-22Ms and Tu-95s, which are capable of hitting distant targets with both conventional and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

For the Kremlin, the goals are more politically oriented, Mr. Felgenhauer said. Frustrated by recent foreign-policy failures – including revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia that saw pro-Western governments take power – Moscow is looking to make a show of force, he said. “The Kremlin wants to show the West that we have strong allies and are still a force to be reckoned with,” he said.

The two countries’ defense ministries said yesterday that the exercises were not aimed at any third country.

“The exercises are to deepen mutual trust, strengthen friendly relations, and bilateral defense and security cooperation, practice joint measures to fight international terrorism and extremism, settle regional crises, and raise the level of joint responses to new challenges and threats,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Defense officials denied that the exercise had any relation to Taiwan, which Beijing has repeatedly threatened to attack if the island pursues formal independence.

“We are not talking at all about North Korea or Taiwan. There were no such talks … so there is no occasion to speak about any third country,” the deputy commander of Russia’s land forces, General Vladimir Moltenskoi, told reporters in Moscow.

General Moltenskoi said the war games would focus on scenarios involving “terrorists” and “ethnic splits, unrest, and confrontations and resistance” in coastal areas.

He said the exercise will be observed by officials from other governments in the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security group dominated by China and Russia that also includes the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Moscow and Beijing have for years been pushing for military cooperation to play a larger role in the SCO, especially as America sought to build allies among Central Asian governments.

Last month, the SCO called on America to set a deadline for withdrawing forces from its bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan – both set up after the September 11, 2001, attacks to support American-led forces in Afghanistan. Last week, Uzbek authorities gave America 180 days to pull out of its base there following American criticism of the May crackdown on anti-government demonstrators in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan.