U.S. Officials Repeatedly Urged China to Help Avert War in Ukraine
Americans
presented Chinese officials with intelligence on Russia’s troop buildup
in hopes that President Xi Jinping would step in, but were repeatedly
rebuffed.
Feb. 25, 2022
WASHINGTON
— Over three months, senior Biden administration officials held half a
dozen urgent meetings with top Chinese officials in which the Americans
presented intelligence showing Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine and beseeched the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade, according to U.S. officials. Each
time, the Chinese officials, including the foreign minister and the
ambassador to the United States, rebuffed the Americans, saying they did
not think an invasion was in the works. After one diplomatic exchange
in December, U.S. officials got intelligence showing Beijing had shared
the information with Moscow, telling the Russians that the United States
was trying to sow discord — and that China would not try to impede
Russian plans and actions, the officials said.
The
previously unreported talks between American and Chinese officials show
how the Biden administration tried to use intelligence findings and
diplomacy to persuade a superpower it views as a growing adversary to
stop the invasion of Ukraine, and how that nation, led by President Xi
Jinping, persistently sided with Russia even as the evidence of Moscow’s plans for a military offensive grew over the winter. This
account is based on interviews with senior administration officials
with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the diplomacy. The Chinese
Embassy did not return requests for comment.
China is Russia’s most powerful partner, and the two nations have been strengthening their bond for
many years across diplomatic, economic and military realms. Mr. Xi and
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, two autocrats with some shared
ideas about global power, had met 37 times as
national leaders before this year. If any world leader could make Mr.
Putin think twice about invading Ukraine, it was Mr. Xi, went the
thinking of some U.S. officials. But
the diplomatic efforts failed, and Mr. Putin began a full-scale
invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning after recognizing two
Russia-backed insurgent enclaves in the country’s east as independent
states.
Some
American officials say the ties between China and Russia appear
stronger than at any time since the Cold War. The two now present
themselves as an ideological front against the United States and its
European and Asian allies, even as Mr. Putin carries out the invasion of
Ukraine, whose sovereignty China has recognized for decades.
The
growing alarm among American and European officials at the alignment
between China and Russia has reached a new peak with the Ukraine crisis,
exactly 50 years to the week after President Richard M. Nixon made a historic trip to China to
restart diplomatic relations to make common cause in counterbalancing
the Soviet Union. For 40 years after that, the relationship between the
United States and China grew stronger, especially as lucrative trade
ties developed, but then frayed due to mutual suspicions, intensifying
strategic competition and antithetical ideas about power and governance. In
the recent private talks on Ukraine, American officials heard language
from their Chinese counterparts that was consistent with harder lines
the Chinese had been voicing in public, which showed that a more hostile
attitude had become entrenched, according to the American accounts.
On
Wednesday, after Mr. Putin ordered troops into eastern Ukraine but
before its full invasion, Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a news conference in Beijing that the United States was “the culprit of current tensions surrounding Ukraine.” “On
the Ukraine issue, lately the U.S. has been sending weapons to Ukraine,
heightening tensions, creating panic and even hyping up the possibility
of warfare,” she said. “If someone keeps pouring oil on the flame while
accusing others of not doing their best to put out the fire, such kind
of behavior is clearly irresponsible and immoral.”
She
added: “When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all
the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic
weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about
the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?” She has refused
to call Russia’s assault an “invasion” when pressed by foreign
journalists.
Ms.
Hua’s fiery anti-American remarks as Russia was moving to attack its
neighbor stunned some current and former U.S. officials and China
analysts in the United States. But the verbal grenades echo major points
in the 5,000-word joint statement that China and Russia issued on Feb.
4 when Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin met at
the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. In that
document, the two countries declared their partnership had “no limits”
and that they intended to stand together against American-led democratic
nations. China also explicitly sided with Russia in the text to
denounce enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Last
Saturday, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, criticized NATO in a
video talk at the Munich Security Conference. European leaders in turn
accused China of working with Russia to overturn what they and the
Americans say is a “rules-based international order.” Mr. Wang did say
that Ukraine’s sovereignty should be “respected and safeguarded” — a
reference to a foreign policy principle that Beijing often cites — but
no Chinese officials have mentioned Ukraine in those terms since
Russia’s full invasion began.
“They
claim neutrality, they claim they stand on principle, but everything
they say about the causes is anti-U.S., blaming NATO and adopting the
Russian line,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown University professor who
was senior Asia director at the White House National Security Council
in the Obama administration. “The question is: How sustainable is that
as a posture? How much damage does it do to their ties with the U.S. and
their ties with Europe?”
The Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach to China to try to avert war began after President Biden and Mr. Xi held a video summit on
Nov. 15. In the talk, the two leaders acknowledged challenges in the
relationship between their nations, which is at its lowest point in
decades, but agreed to try to cooperate on issues of common interest,
including health security, climate change and nuclear weapons
proliferation, White House officials said at the time. After
the meeting, American officials decided that the Russian troop buildup
around Ukraine presented the most immediate problem that China and the
United States could try to defuse together. Some officials thought the
outcome of the video summit indicated there was potential for an
improvement in U.S.-China relations. Others were more skeptical, but
thought it was important to leave no stone unturned in efforts to
prevent Russia from attacking, one official said.
Days
later, White House officials met with the ambassador, Qin Gang, at the
Chinese Embassy. They told the ambassador what U.S. intelligence
agencies had detected: a gradual encirclement of Ukraine by Russian
forces, including armored units. William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director,
had flown to Moscow on Nov. 2 to confront the Russians with the same
information, and on Nov. 17, American intelligence officials shared their findings with NATO. At
the Chinese Embassy, Russia’s aggression was the first topic in a
discussion that ran more than one and a half hours. In addition to
laying out the intelligence, the White House officials told the
ambassador that the United States would impose tough sanctions on
Russian companies, officials and businesspeople in the event of an
invasion, going far beyond those announced by the Obama administration
after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
The U.S. officials said the sanctions would also hurt China over time because of its commercial ties.
They
also pointed out they knew how China had helped Russia evade some of
the 2014 sanctions, and warned Beijing against any such future aid. And
they argued that because China was widely seen as a partner of Russia,
its global image could suffer if Mr. Putin invaded.
The
message was clear: It would be in China’s interests to persuade Mr.
Putin to stand down. But their entreaties went nowhere. Mr. Qin was
skeptical and suspicious, an American official said.
American
officials spoke with the ambassador about Russia at least three more
times, both in the embassy and on the phone. Wendy R. Sherman, the
deputy secretary of state, had a call with him. Mr. Qin continued to
express skepticism and said Russia had legitimate security concerns in
Europe.
The
Americans also went higher on the diplomatic ladder: Secretary of State
Antony J. Blinken spoke to Mr. Wang about the problem in late January
and again on Monday, the same day Mr. Putin ordered the new troops into
Russia-backed enclaves of Ukraine.
“The
secretary underscored the need to preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty and
territorial integrity,” said a State Department summary of the call that
used the phrase that Chinese diplomats like to employ in signaling to
other nations not to get involved in matters involving Taiwan, Tibet,
Xinjiang and Hong Kong, all considered separatist problems by Beijing.
American
officials met with Mr. Qin in Washington again on Wednesday and heard
the same rebuttals. Hours later, Mr. Putin declared war on Ukraine on
television, and his military began pummeling the country with ballistic
missiles as tanks rolled across the border.