MOSCOW, May 30. /TASS/. The EU expert community is starting to produce reports directed against China, said Ivan Timofeev, director general at the Russian Council on International Affairs.

He made the remarks ahead of the international conference titled "Russia and China: Cooperation in a New Era."

"Anti-Chinese sentiments have intensified in the European Union recently. Ten years ago, it was hard to imagine that anti-Chinese analytical reports would appear in the European expert community. But they have started to appear. Yes, there are not so many of them yet, but such anti-China groups in the European Union are steadily growing. With regard to Russia, everything also started with such groups," Timofeev told TASS.

Timofeev said Chinese diplomacy is making serious efforts to develop relations with EU countries.

"The EU, it seems to me, is seen in China as a player with the potential for independence. Beijing's relations with Washington are more about rivalry, but relations with the EU are more constructive," the analyst said.

According to Timofeev, Russian diplomacy has long tried to conduct dialogue with the European Union as an independent player on the international stage, separating the agenda of Russian-American relations from Russian-EU relations.

"But later it turned out that the EU is more dependent on Washington's policies than it might have seemed," the analyst stated.

The analyst said the EU essentially sided with Washington on certain issues of European security that are fundamental for Russia, and pursued no policies of its own. According to Timofeev, their positions started to coincide after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine.

"It turns out that the European Union does not exist in these issues as a player with its own perspective that would differ from Washington's position. The level of the EU's strategic autonomy is lower than it could be. It is a big question whether this is the cause of the European security crisis, but it can probably be regarded as one of the factors," the analyst said.

Timofeev said that this serves as an important lesson for China-EU relations, "because at some point it may turn out that Brussels is more dependent on Washington than it seems in matters of policy toward Beijing.".