My Take | Why Xi took Zelensky’s phone call this time

Without dismissing it outright, Brussels and Washington will now play down the significance of Xi Jinping’s hour-long phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky. Their fear has always been that Beijing may intervene constructively in the conflict, not that it might support the Russians as alleged. They would likely have preferred the Chinese to side openly with Russia. That way, they wouldn’t have to waste so much time and energy drumming up the Taiwan invasion threat and conjuring the spectre of the Chinese bogeyman rising to destroy Western civilisation. Those narratives would then have flowed naturally, without being constantly challenged by knowledgeable critics.

But at the end of the day, China is the only country that both Moscow and Kyiv would talk to, the only one that has provided not weapons but a peace plan. After the phone call initiated by Zelensky, Beijing will dispatch a special envoy to search for a peace settlement. At least France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has taken much grief for asking Xi to intervene – can now tell his critics to get stuffed.

So, the question is, why now for the Chinese? Whether by design or accident, this is a good time for Beijing to start getting involved. Any time before now would have meant Beijing giving up on Russia and conceding to the Western alliance’s proxy war aims to destroy or at least discredit the Putin regime. Why would Xi do that just so he could be called “a good boy” by the West. Of course Beijing refused to play ball, and hence all the endless Sino-phobic Western media and political propaganda attacks.

Now, though, the rosy picture that Washington and Brussels have painted about a Ukrainian victory is being questioned, if not undermined, not least because of the massive leaks of classified information on the Discord social media platform.

The leaks show a very different picture of what Western officials have publicly said about the war with their almost entirely optimistic claims. It appears they have known much longer than they let on that the Putin regime won’t collapse, and the Russian economy is not about to crash; Ukrainian forces are being depleted at an alarming rate, and their air defences are breaking down without substantial reinforcement with advanced Western weapons. This in turn has meant the United States deploying small special forces units on the ground, though the Joe Biden White House has insisted that only the Ukrainians are doing the fighting – to avoid a third world war.

How will Washington and Nato respond if Russian and US forces come into contact? Time for another continental war?! A similar scenario almost played out when a Russian fighter jet nearly shot down a British spy plane over the Black Sea because of miscommunication.

The rest of the world has never bought into this rosy Western story, not after Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and “the war on terror”. But it appears much of public opinion in the West did. Now though, that triumphal narrative is getting harder to sustain.