How long will China support Putin as he risks a world war?

OTTAWA—Exactly how much China’s Xi Jinping knew in advance about Russian ruler Vladimir Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine has been a matter of dispute. But in retrospect, it’s obvious Putin wouldn’t have carried out the attack without getting the green light from his ally in Beijing. There’s no other way to interpret the 5,000-word joint statement issued by the two dictators back in early February, when Putin became the most high-level international figure lending a hand in the Winter Olympics sportswashing of Beijing’s horrendous human rights record. Xi, who has met with Putin 38 times, was quoted as telling his guest that China and Russia are committed to "deepening back-to-back strategic co-operation.” According to the state-run news agency, Xi added: “This is a strategic decision that has far-reaching influence on China, Russia, and the world.” With Russian military forces then gathering at the Ukraine border, Xi lent his weight in advance to the Kremlin’s supposed justification for the coming attack. “ oppose the further expansion of NATO, call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon the ideological approaches of the Cold War,” the two leaders said on Feb. 4. Putin, personally obsessed with regaining territory lost when the Soviet Union collapsed, has found a welcome partner in Xi, with both dictators now aligned in a multi-faceted drive to undermine U.S. military and economic might and reorient the long-term balance of power globally. It’s the closest alliance of the two countries in many decades. “We’re seeing that while Beijing doesn’t really like Putin’s tactics, they’re willing to band together as authoritarian states against the Western democracies,” Michèle Flournoy, a former Pentagon policy official, told the Wall Street Journal after the attack on Ukraine. “We are going to see more and more of that in the future.” China has continued to provide diplomatic cover for Putin, abstaining from a UN vote calling for Putin to abandon the invasion and amplifying Russian propaganda lies alleging the U.S. supports chemical and biological weapons labs in Ukraine—lies that the U.S. has warned could be a ploy in advance of the use of chemical weapons by Putin against Ukrainians. At the same time, the Chinese have made half-hearted efforts to balance their position by talking about the need for a halt in the fighting and offering to mediate ceasefire talks. It’s likely that Xi is the only person who could persuade Putin to accept a ceasefire. And it’s probably the case that the Chinese ruler likely didn’t expect to find himself linked to the kind of international firestorm of condemnation arising from the Kremlin’s brutal, indiscriminate assault on its neighbour. Accordingly, Xi’s support for Putin risks jeopardizing vital Chinese trade relations with Europe and the U.S. and could set back years of extensive global “soft power” initiatives by Beijing. On the other side of the ledger, observers note that Xi’s current ties to Putin would make it difficult for China to openly oppose Putin’s military aggression. This took on new urgency on the weekend when a U.S. official said Russia has asked China for assistance in its invasion in Ukraine. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned Xi to avoid helping Russia evade the unprecedented global sanctions intended to devastate Russia’s economy. “We will not allow that to go forward and allow there to be a lifeline to Russia from these economic sanctions from any country anywhere in the world,” Sullivan said. The assumption is that Putin turned to Beijing for help because the military incursion in Ukraine had slowed and because of the surprising scale of sanctions imposed by an unexpectedly unified response from the West. Russia and China both denied the U.S. government report, with Beijing accusing the White House of spreading “disinformation.” Sullivan met with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, in Rome on March 14 to discuss Putin’s ongoing invasion. But the talks, as expected, reportedly yielded little progress. The real question is rapidly becoming: is Xi willing to go along for the ride as Putin pushes everyone involved toward a world war with the explicit threat of using nuclear weapons? This has the potential to thrust the world into a cycle of high-risk violence that global leaders have managed to avoid for 70 years. In fact, this may already be the case, as it’s increasingly apparent that Putin’s militaristic, self-delusionary notion about reclaiming parts of Europe by force has no Plan B. Les Whittington is a regular columnist for The Hill Times. The Hill Times

How long will China support Putin as he risks a world war?

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How long will China support Putin as he risks a world war?

The real question is rapidly becoming: is Xi willing to go along for the ride as Putin pushes everyone involved toward a world war with the explicit threat of using nuclear weapons?

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