The article aims to determine the role of critical thinking skills in learning Russian at Chinese universities and to consider this aspect when organizing an online learning environment for students. The research involved 600 students and 50 teachers from the Russian language and math faculties. The analysis of Chinese students' Russian language learning allowed the conclusion that there is a possible relationship between language competence and critical thinking skills. At the same time, the study did not identify any educational standards that included critical thinking as a skill in the educational process. The study showed that the Chinese education system needs to align educational standards with fundamental concepts of critical thinking and move away from a random use of individual theories tools. Future research might concentrate on testing the hypothesis about the close relationship between critical thinking and success in learning Russian as an L2 using various statistical methods (for instance, Student's t test or Kruskal-Wallis test).