China Casts Itself as Peacemaker in First High-Level Talks With Ukraine Since Russia’s Invasion
Beijing has been a key player in helping Russia evade Western sanctions
The Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2024
Ukraine’s top diplomat met with his Chinese counterpart Wednesday for hours of talks in his first such high-level visit to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion, as Kyiv seeks Beijing’s support to end the war on “just” terms.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reiterated Beijing’s calls for a diplomatic solution to the war during the meeting in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, who said his country would negotiate when Moscow was ready to engage “in good faith.”
“No such readiness is currently observed on the Russian side,” Kuleba said, according to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. A Kremlin spokesman said in response that Moscow “has always maintained its openness to the negotiation process.”
Efforts to kick-start dialogue between Russia and Ukraine have faltered during a war that has upended European security and triggered commodity price shocks worldwide. Several countries have attempted to broker peace talks, beginning with Turkey in the weeks after Russia’s February 2022 invasion.
While officially professing neutrality in response to the war, China has been a key partner in helping Russia weather Western economic sanctions imposed in response to the invasion. Trade between the two countries has soared, with China buying up Russian oil and gas while providing consumer goods that are increasingly hard for Russia to buy from the West. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a “no-limits” friendship shortly before the war and see mutual benefit in resisting Western pressure.
U.S. and European officials have also accused China of providing Russia with dual-use equipment such as microchips and drone parts to help Moscow rebuild its military. China has denied supplying weapons to Russia and says it strictly controls the trade of dual-use goods.
Beijing has increasingly sought to portray itself as a global peacemaker. This week, it also hosted a meeting of Palestinian rival factions including Hamas and Fatah, which have been estranged for years. Representatives of the 14 groups signed an agreement to work toward unity and establish an interim reconciliation government, but with few details on how that would happen. China has called for a cease-fire in Ukraine and issued a statement with Brazil in May on resolving the war. Russia describes its war on Ukraine as a “special military operation” and China also only refers to it as a “crisis”—a description Wang continued to use Wednesday.
The talks in Guangzhou come on the heels of a public feud between Zelensky and China during a visit last month to Singapore, when he accused Beijing of lobbying countries to boycott a peace conference in Switzerland through which Ukraine sought to build pressure on Russia to end the war on Kyiv’s terms. Xi was invited to the mid-June summit by Zelensky but didn’t attend. Beijing had said that any peace conference should be endorsed by both Ukraine and Russia, which wasn’t invited.
Chinese
leader Xi Jinping spoke on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky, signaling China’s desire to become a global power broker.
WSJ’s Austin Ramzy explains how Beijing’s peacemaking efforts could
challenge the U.S. Photo Composite: Diana Chan
“The best Ukraine can hope for is a patching up of relations with China,” said Lucian Kim, a senior Ukraine analyst at the International Crisis Group. “China has already indicated which side it’s backing.”
Wang didn’t allude to that summit or Zelensky’s criticism on Wednesday, according to a description of the meeting from China’s Foreign Ministry.
“China believes that all conflicts must be resolved by returning to the negotiating table, and that all disputes must be resolved through political means,” Wang said. “Recently, the Russian and Ukrainian sides have, to varying degrees, signaled their willingness to negotiate.”
For Ukraine, the talks come as questions grow about continued U.S. support for Kyiv’s war effort if former President Donald Trump recaptures the White House. Trump didn’t directly answer a question about whether he would pull funding for Ukraine in a Fox News interview that aired Tuesday night. He repeated his claims that Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he were still in office and said he told Zelensky in a call last week: “We’ve got to get this war over.”
In his public comments following the talks with Kuleba, Wang didn’t criticize the U.S., which China has accused of fueling the war by providing weapons to Ukraine. Instead, he emphasized the six-point peace proposal on Ukraine that China issued with Brazil in May, which called for no escalation of the fighting and for all parties to avoid provocation. China’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said the Ukrainians had “carefully studied” the proposal.
A recent poll indicated that support for peace talks among Ukrainians has increased as the war enters its third summer, but a majority of respondents oppose the current cease-fire conditions laid out by Putin. Those entail the complete Ukrainian withdrawal from the four regions that are partially occupied by Russia, including several major cities still under Kyiv’s control.
Putin has also demanded Western sanctions be lifted and that Kyiv agree to a neutral status and abandon plans to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a precondition for talks.
Zelensky has presented his own list of 10 demands, which the Kremlin isn’t entertaining, including the withdrawal of Russian troops before peace talks begin, the restoration of Ukrainian control over currently occupied territory and the prosecution of alleged Russian war crimes.
Ukraine’s demands gained some traction when initially floated in a peace plan early last year as Kyiv prepared for a major counteroffensive after initially repelling Russia’s invasion. The counteroffensive failed to achieve significant gains, and Russian forces are now snatching territory from overstretched Ukrainian forces in the east of the country. At the same time, international attention has swung toward the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Ukraine might be seeking to get China on board with a second summit that Kyiv is pushing to hold later this year to advance its vision for peace. Ukraine has said it would like its second summit to be hosted by a Global South country, and that Russia should attend.
However, there may be little progress until the outcome of the November election in the U.S., Kim said. “There’s understanding in Moscow and in Kyiv that nothing substantial is going to change until there’s clarity [on the U.S. election]. It’s the key event for what happens next.”
Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com and Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com