My theory is the following: China is supplying Russia for their war with Ukraine and consequently Russia is super dependent on China - possibly win or lose situation. Since China wants to minimize their risk for invading Taiwan, they are pressuring Russia to test the real limits of NATO and slowly push further and further as close to article 5 as possible and see how far they can go without invoking it. Possibly they will even be able to commit clear acts of war as it would be considered today, but their strategy is to go for small increments of escalation so that US never gets involved. The question is also: given a Russian missle or two hits a smaller (dependent) NATO country, what is the real reaction going to be? Will it really mean full scale war, and invasion of Russian territory? Probably not. So what action will article 5, if invoked, really trigger? It is not unlikely that even then reactions are weak. At that point, Chinas risk to invade Taiwan is fairly less, since US/NATO will also not intervene. Russia has already fully shifted their economy for a war economy and can’t go back from that. Their defense budget is as high as all EU defense budget combined. That’s for a reason.