Beijing seems to have been caught off guard by triggering the war. If China condemns “the extension of military blocks”, allusion to NATO, it is ready to “support all the efforts” to achieve a solution.
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China have been taken short by the war launched on Thursday, February 24 by Russia against Ukraine? Several elements accredit this hypothesis. First the silence of Xi Jinping all day from Thursday. While several Western leaders have sought to reach him, the number one Chinese has not deigned to answer, passing on the message he was busy preparing the annual session of the Chinese parliament, which starts on March 4th. Chinese President spoke only one leader: Vladimir Putin. And only on Friday afternoon.
Other index: the press release after this discussion, as are the “details” on the Chinese position, published on Friday 25 February at the end of the day by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, differs significantly from the release published the day before by The same department. Thursday, this one, reporting on a telephone exchange between Wang Yi and Sergei Lavrov, the Chinese and Russian ministers of foreign affairs, indicated that Beijing “includes the legitimate concerns of Russia” for its security and “a story” Complicated and special “was” behind the Ukrainian question “. As if China made a sprain with its sacramental principle of respect for the sovereignty and integrity of states.
Third index of this unparallery: Thursday, February 24, the Chinese Embassy in Kiev enjoys the Chinese nationals who needed to get out of home to highlight the Chinese flag on their car, before advising, two days later, to be the most discrete as possible. On the other hand, in the days preceding the 24th, the Chinese press has continued to make fun of Joe Biden, who had alerted the global opinion on the triggering of an invasion on February 8. As for the representative of China to the United Nations, the extreme brevity of its interventions before the Security Council, notably on Monday, February 21, encourages Western diplomats to consider that it had not received any setpoint of Beijing.
“deplore” without “condemning”
In fact, China’s position was, it seems, defined by President Xi Jinping himself on Friday, February 25 at the end of the morning, before his phone call with Russian president. The “respect and safeguarding of the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of all countries” constitute the keystone. During telephone exchanges with several European diplomats on Friday, Wang Yi has been, according to one of them, very firm on one point: “China does not want war.” The press release indicates: “The current situation is Something we do not want to see. “
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