Letters | Ukraine peace plans by China and Indonesia have a common fault: they work against their proponent’s interests

Readers discuss the importance of upholding territorial integrity in a peace plan, and why China sees no reason to play the US game

Ukraine war

Letters

Published: 2:30pm, 7 Jun 2023

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Peace plans for Ukraine have been proposed by China and most recently by Indonesia: both work against the interests of their proponents.

Let us be clear what is involved in Russia’s actions in Ukraine. A member state of the United Nations has used military force to acquire the territory of another member, in contravention of Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter.

Two elements of the Ukraine war should worry China and Indonesia as they craft their diplomatic positions on the conflict and their engagement with Russia.

First, Russia justifies its military action by rejecting the historical legitimacy of accepted borders and by pointing to self-determination for the populations on whose behalf it claims to be intervening.

Second, Russia now relies on militarily achieved “facts on the ground” to assert that it is the efforts to reverse its acquisition that prolong the conflict and that threaten escalation into a regional or indeed nuclear war.

It is passing strange that a state that faces potential external intervention on behalf of the populace of one of its provinces would tolerate similar intervention elsewhere in the international community. Nor is it comprehensible that it would want to see a precedent set for reversal of border settlements accepted by the majority of the international community and that are central to a state’s territorial integrity.

Likewise, it is perplexing that a state facing a contest of its claims to territorial sovereignty in the seas off its land masses, and which currently seeks peaceful diplomatic resolution and interim codes of conduct with the major competitor state, would find acceptable a “facts on the ground” precedent involving a militarily superior power setting irreversible negotiating parameters in a dispute.

These are the implications for both Taiwan and the South China Sea in the response of the international community to the flouting of the United Nations Charter by Russia.

Any peace proposal for Ukraine must be grounded on the non-negotiability of the territorial integrity of a UN member state in the face of military action. It must not contemplate lines of control and demilitarised zones that will likely reinforce territorial acquisition through military “facts on the ground”.

It should be hard-nosed about purported rights to self-determination, not least outside a post-colonial setting, and certainly not accept proposals for plebiscites in regions controlled and depopulated by the aggressor.

The peace proposals by China and Indonesia do not meet these criteria. To the extent that the proposals accept, in any way, diminution of a UN member state’s territorial integrity or pre-emption of the peaceful resolution of historical claims of sovereignty by force of arms, they are against their countries’ interests – for China in its defence of its sovereignty over Taiwan, and for Indonesia in defence of its maritime sovereignty and of rules-based management and resolution of conflict in the South China Sea.

Chris Gardiner, CEO, The Institute for Regional Security

Why China won’t play the US game

In a poem published in the 19th century, the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin hints that what gold buys a sword takes. But if we collect the former to spend it, no one ever forswears the latter. And unlike wealth, weapons can be legally exported. That makes curbing their proliferation a mission impossible, as Alex Lo discovers (“Biden left waiting by the phone as China refuses to play any more”, May 31).

There are fewer economic superpowers than military ones, and we in Russia successfully developed our atomic bomb while the country was still in ruins just a few years after World War II. We knew that gold buys only what is on the market while a sword takes it all and thus is a winner.

The Chinese were better than we were at amassing gold and forging a sword, leaving the West unable to bribe or intimidate their country into becoming an ally.

In nature, a symbiosis is impossible between similar organisms of different species, and we in Siberia don’t see bears and tigers benefiting from each other. That’s also the case with countries. It’s rather baffling why Beijing and Moscow are quite comfortable with the status quo and Washington is not.

Mergen Mongush, Moscow