: China’s Support for Russian Aggression Toward Ukraine Confirms the West’s Worst Fears #WorldNEWS In January, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a note to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

China’s Support for Russian Aggression Toward Ukraine Confirms the West’s Worst Fears #WorldNEWS
In January, Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a note to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to celebrate three decades of diplomatic ties. Ukraine is, after all, a key member of Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative—a trillion repaving of the fabled Silk Road—with whom China enjoyed over billion of bilateral trade in 2020. “I attach great importance to the development of the China-Ukraine strategic partnership,” Xi said, hailing a “deepening political mutual trust, fruitful cooperation in various fields and even closer people-to-people and cultural exchanges. ”
It must have come as something of a shock, then, when Xi learned that Ukraine, according to the claims of Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, “never had a tradition of genuine statehood. ”
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China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong isn’t used to being contradicted. But as Russia ordered troops into Ukraine’s restive eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions on Monday, China’s stance regarding Putin’s revisionary aggression remains curiously incoherent and ambivalent: On one level in support of the rules-based international order; on the other tacitly backing Putin’s strongman realpolitik.
Read More: Putins Moves Toward War in Ukraine Show How Dangerous He Has Become
Following a summit at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Xi and Putin issued a joint statement on Feb. 4, criticizing the “negative” U. S. influence both in Europe and across the Asia-Pacific. They also said they would be deepening a no limits strategic partnership, while opposing “the further expansion of NATO” in what they deemed a “Cold War era” approach.
Professor Steve Tsang, director of SOAS China Institute at the University of London, argues that it was as “strong can you get in terms of support short of forming a formal alliance. Chinese state media, meanwhile, gushed that the two nations stood shoulder to shoulder in upholding justice in the world. ”
At an emergency U. N. Security Council meeting on Monday, Zhang Jun, Chinas ambassador to the U. N. , called for restraint by all sides. While officially calling for “calm, restraint and dialogue” on Tuesday to resolve the Ukraine crisis, Beijing’s repeated repudiation of the West, like that in Beijing Feb. 4, is effectively cheerleading Putin’s belligerence.
Meanwhile its purchase of Russian oil—bilateral trade rose 33. 6% year-on-year to some 0 billion in 2021—is likely to dampen the impact of Western sanctions. Following the 2014 invasion of Crimea, several Chinese state banks provided loans for Russian counterparts sanctioned by the West.