The China-Egypt Eagles of Civilization 2025 joint air force exercises began on April 19 and will end in early May. Washington Times Special Correspondent Richard S. Ehrlich examines how the drills are expected to strengthen links between Egypt, which boasts Africa’s strongest military and is a strategic U.S. ally, and China, which is expanding militarily and has an East African naval base in Djibouti on the Red Sea.

The air combat exercises include Chinese midair refueling with a Y-20U aerial tanker, air support, battlefield search and rescue, and a Kong Jing-500 airborne warning and control system. Egypt’s MiG-29M/M2 Fulcrum multirole fighters and other aircraft have also filled the skies, hosting the drills about 60 miles west of the Gulf of Suez and some 4,500 miles from Beijing.

Beijing also sent China’s stealthy J-10 Vigorous Dragon fighter jets, known by NATO as Firebirds. These jets are prized for their dogfighting maneuverability, precision strikes and the ability to be configured with air-to-air and air-to-ground bombs. According to reports quoting the China 3 Army Telegram channel, the drills have included Chinese anti-radiation missiles and a 23mm cannon.

Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko is expected to sign the major rare earth minerals extraction agreement with the Trump administration as early as Wednesday — a development that could rapidly advance or further complicate Mr. Trump’s attempts to engineer end-of-war negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

According to various reports, Ms. Svyrydenko is in Washington to finalize the resource deal with U.S. negotiators, although it was not clear Wednesday morning whether the Trump administration was ready to sign. The pact, which has been in development for months, would reportedly create a joint fund to manage Ukraine’s investments in its natural resources. 

Mr. Trump has said he wants Ukraine’s rare earth elements as a condition of future U.S. military support.

Sources have told Threat Status the deal involves valuable minerals in areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk region that are currently occupied by Russian forces. 

South Korea’s Democratic Party will maintain the nation’s alliance with the U.S. and cooperation with Japan, and the party will not tilt toward China if it wins the June 3 presidential election, a foreign-affairs expert of the liberal party says.

Yet lawmaker Wi Sung-lac tells Threat Status that reengaging with North Korea, reviving historical diplomatic disputes with Tokyo and responding to Mr. Trump’s tariffs are also on the table. The potential use of U.S. Forces Korea for off-peninsula actions, such as a Taiwan crisis, is murky.

“The main pillar of [Democratic Party of Korea] foreign policy thinking is a strong alliance between South Korea and the U.S. and the partnership between South Korea and Japan and trilateral cooperation,” Mr. Wi told Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon.

American researchers funded by the Pentagon have helped Chinese military companies despite U.S. sanctions and other legal restrictions on such use, according to a report by Parallax Advance Research, which warns that at least $48 million in Pentagon funding has benefited the People’s Liberation Army.

“The entanglement of DoD-funded research with Chinese military-affiliated entities raises urgent national security concerns, particularly as adversaries like China seek to exploit emerging technologies for strategic advantage,” according to the report, examined by National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz.

The assessment dovetails with the findings of an investigation last year by Republicans on the House Education and the Workforce Committee and the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the U.S. and China. Those findings said “hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. federal research funding over the last decade” have helped the Chinese Communist Party “achieve advancements in … emerging technologies like hypersonic weapons.”

Clifford D. May, a contributor to Threat Status, writes that “Russia has been receiving drones and missiles from the Islamist regime in Tehran, KN-23 ballistic missiles from the dynastic dictatorship in North Korea and critical military technologies from the communist regime in Beijing.”

“These authoritarian states don’t hate Ukrainians. They simply recognize that if Mr. Putin can use military force to crush a pro-American neighbor, that will set a precedent for similar aggressions against their American-allied neighbors,” writes Mr. May.

He adds that “it’s lovely to think everyone prizes peace, but if that were true, Mr. Putin wouldn’t have begun this war and would have sought an ‘off-ramp’ when it became clear that the Ukrainians would fight like wolverines rather than surrender their freedom.”

• April 30-May 1 — RSAC 2025, RSA Conference 

• April 30-May 1 — Modern Day Marine Convention

• May 1 — Gambling on Armageddon: Costs and Risks of Nuclear Modernization, Stimson Center

• May 1 — Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang on Securing U.S. AI Leadership, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• May 1 — Cuba’s Kleptocracy: How It Works and Why It Matters for U.S. Policy, Hudson Institute

• May 5-8 — SOF Week 2025: The Asymmetric Strategic Option for a Volatile World, U.S. Special Operations Command & Global SOF Foundation