China and Russia are aligned around an “anti-Western” strategic posture, but Beijing views Moscow as “a junior partner, according to Miles Yu, who teaches East Asia and military history at the U.S. Naval Academy and is director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center.

Mr. Yu said during an exclusive video interview for the latest edition of the Threat Status Influencers Series that the “relationship between China and Russia is not really equal, because clearly China is the boss. Russia is a proxy.” He noted that the size of Russia’s economy is less than one-tenth the size of China’s economy.

At the same time, “Russia is more aggressive on smaller things and China needs Russia as an attack dog in places like Ukraine, so that Russia could create strategic distractions for the United States … so the U.S. cannot put its full focus on China,” said Mr. Yu, who is also a Washington Times opinion columnist and contributor to Threat Status.

The threat of rising extremist terrorism rocked Central Africa over the weekend, with an Islamic State-backed rebel group killing at least 34 people in an attack on a Catholic Church in eastern Congo. The violence comes roughly a month after Congolese and Rwandan leaders signed a historic peace agreement toward ending decades of war in the region, which remains rife with ethnic and religious division and tension.

There is currently no permanent U.S. military installation in Congo, and the impact of American counterterrorism operations in the region has been limited since last year, when U.S. forces handed control over two crucial counterterrorism hubs to local authorities in Niger, some 2,000 miles away from Congo.

The Associated Press reported that Saturday’s attack occurred in Komanda in eastern Congo. Attackers stormed the church at around 1 a.m. Several houses and shops were also burnt. Video footage from the scene appears to show burning structures and bodies on the floor of the church.

Guillaume Ptak, The Times’ special correspondent based in Ukraine, explains in a new exclusive video report that Russia’s shift during recent months to “large-scale drone attacks” is overwhelming the Ukrainian military’s defenses, exposing a “dangerous gap” in Kyiv’s capabilities that will likely define the next phase of the more than three-year-old war.

Late last year, Russia launched about 2,000 drones monthly. Since then, that figure has more than doubled, according to a recent assessment that the Atlantic Council published by Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst and research fellow at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies.

Many of the drones now being used against Ukraine are produced domestically in Russia and have been enhanced with artificial intelligence navigation systems, video targeting and thermobaric warheads that have doubled their explosive payload to about 200 pounds. Russia’s shift toward full domestic production has been supported by Iranian technology transfers and, according to Ukrainian officials, has benefited from technical support from China and labor assistance from North Korea.

Beijing is accused of supplying critical components, and Pyongyang is reportedly preparing to send workers to drone manufacturing facilities in eastern Russia. As a result, Russia’s drone penetration rate into Ukrainian airspace has nearly tripled.

A unique, grassroots political movement in Taiwan aiming to overthrow allegedly pro-China lawmakers failed spectacularly over the weekend. The “Great Recall” sought to overturn the opposition majority in the Legislative Yuan and re-empower President Lai Ching-te, whose policies have been obstructed by the chamber.

Preliminary vote counts show Taiwanese voters rejected the bid to oust about one-fifth of their lawmakers, all from the opposition Nationalist Party, dampening hopes for Mr. Lai’s ruling party to flip the balance of power in the self-ruled island’s legislature.

Mr. Lai’s independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party won last year’s presidential election, but the China-friendly Nationalists, also known as the KMT, and the smaller Taiwan People’s Party will continue to control a majority bloc in the legislature. Recent years have seen Chinese President Xi Jinping make annexing the island democracy a “core” interest of Beijing.

The Times’ national security and foreign affairs columnist Jed Babbin asserts that “the person who interrupted our arms shipments to Ukraine was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, grandson of former CIA Director William Colby.”

Mr. Colby did so for the “excellent reasons” of “China and our inability to resume the role of the ‘arsenal of democracy’ we had in World War II,” writes Mr. Babbin, who argues that the U.S. arms industry faces a “big problem” of having to replace arsenals that get shipped to Ukraine at a moment when a greater Chinese military threat looms on the horizon.

“Lockheed Martin made more than 500 Patriot missiles last year. The company is apparently trying to build capacity to produce 750 by 2027 to meet growing global demand,” Mr. Babbin writes, adding that “Russian President Vladimir Putin has the benefit of Iranian drone production and North Korean ammunition. We lack both, and we have a bigger problem than Ukraine: China.”

• July 28 — David Petraeus on What Taiwan Can Learn from Ukraine’s Battlefield Experience, Hudson Institute

• July 29 — Global Compute and National Security, Center for a New American Security

• July 29 — Will the Iraq-Kuwait Dispute Undermine the Future of Gulf Integration? Chatham House

• July 29 — ICE Pact: The Icebreaker Collaboration Effort and Arctic Security Conversation, The Heritage Foundation

• July 30 — Malaysia, China and the Region in a Pivotal Year, Lowy Institute

• July 31 — How Congress Can Rebuild U.S. Shipbuilding and Boost Maritime Security, Hudson Institute

• July 31 — Breaking Out of Quarantine: Wargaming a Chinese Blockade of Taiwan, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Aug. 5 — Misinformation: What Is It and What Should We Do About It? Cato Institute