Xi Jinping’s China Increasingly Weary of Vladimir Putin’s Drawn-Out War.
The fact that the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs met, on September 22, 2022, his Ukrainian counterpart, has nothing trivial.
The meeting in Samarkand on September 15-16, 2022, of the member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO, founded in the early 2000s by China and Russia as a counterweight to Western international organizations) showed that Vladimir Putin still has friends in the world, despite his military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Russia continues to have excellent political and economic relations with the four major Eastern powers of Turkey, Iran, India, and China. These countries share Russia's view that the West is illegitimate in imposing its vision of democracy on the world.
All five have been critical of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the pretense of regime change. They believe that the expansion of NATO to the East after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was excessive.
These countries consider the American idea - expressed as early as 2008 - of extending NATO's limits to the Russo-Ukrainian border to be provocative. That is why they did not rush to condemn Russia's blatant attack on Ukraine's territorial integrity.
Did these countries approve of the invasion of Ukraine by Putin's Russia? Nothing is less certain.
None of these Eastern countries had recognized the “soft” annexation (without bloodshed and after a popular referendum) of Crimea by Russia in March 2014. Reticent about territorial changes by force, neither India, nor China, nor Iran had, moreover, recognized the independence of Kosovo, a secessionist Albanian-speaking region of Serbia, which Belgrade had had to let go of, after a bombing campaign of nearly three months, carried out by NATO in 1999.
If Vladimir Putin had succeeded in his gamble, if he had succeeded in convincing the Ukrainian generals to join him, if he had installed in Kyiv a “denazified” government at his beck and call, these Eastern countries would probably have closed their eyes, to recognize in a second time the “fait accompli”. But as the Russian army failed, as it provoked a magnificent resistance of the whole Ukrainian people, as Putin's “special military operation” looks much more like a classical war than a special operation, these Eastern powers decided to open their eyes wide.
What does the first of them, China, see?
China sees a Russia in military failure, which surprises it, but does not distress it too much. But it also sees, to its dismay, that the Kremlin is moving towards escalation, mobilizing 300,000 additional reservists, and insinuating that it could use nuclear weapons. This is what the Chinese call adventurism in foreign policy and it is everything they hate.
In their history, the Chinese have shown that they greatly prefer trade to war. The only trade they ever refused was opium, which the British forced upon them in the first half of the 19th century. After the Maoist parenthesis, which lasted from the early 1950s to the early 1980s, China abandoned ideology and began to produce and trade.
Through hard work and perseverance, it has become the world's largest manufacturing and trading power. This was already the case before the industrial age.
Today, Beijing China is tired of Putin's war in Ukraine. Through the spiral of sanctions and counter-sanctions, this war risks breaking the dynamics of world trade and leading to a political-technological partition of the world. Yet the workshop of the world wishes to continue to export without hindrance to all the markets of the planet, starting with the most solvent, the Westerners.
This is why the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, clearly said in Samarkand that it was time for this war to end. He was joined on this point by the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. To make China's message to Russia even clearer, the Chinese foreign minister met with his Ukrainian counterpart on September 22, 2022. It was in New York, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
Wang Yi reassured Dmytro Kouleba of China's commitment to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of States. The latter reminded him that Ukraine recognizes only one China. The two countries intend to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their diplomatic relations with dignity. Does this mean that China could become a mediator between Russia and Ukraine tomorrow? Its economic and diplomatic weight points to it. Much more so than Turkey, which tried its hand at this role in March 2022, without success.
Some reading
Impotent in the Face of Crises, What Can Be the Future of the UN? The legitimacy of the UN continues to sink.
Putin Has Passed the Point Of Not Return — The Security and Stability of the World Mean Moving On to the Post-Putin Era. There is nothing to negotiate with Putin. Russia gambled on force and lost.
There Is No Alternative — The Omnipotence of the USD King Has Been Confirmed More Than Ever in 2022. The reasons are multiple and have been highlighted with the war in Ukraine.
“Das Krisenjahr” — The Trauma of the Hyperinflation of 1923 During the Weimar Republic in Germany. The fight against inflation has since become a doctrinal pillar of Germany.
This Is the Book to Read If You Want to Discover the True Face of the Kremlin Dictator Vladimir Putin. Catherine Belton’s book will help you understand why the West must support Ukraine at all costs.
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