China ‘unlikely to take sides’ in a Russia-Ukraine conflict

Beijing has neither the capacity nor the will to go to Moscow’s side and has good ties with both countries, analysts say
Russian troops on border are a warning to ‘keep Ukraine out of Nato’

Diplomacy

Kristin Huang

Published: 6:28pm, 7 Dec 2021

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China is unlikely to wade into the simmering conflict between Russia and Ukraine as fears grow of a Russian invasion and the possibility of US troop involvement, observers said.

Russia has sent an estimated 100,000 troops to the border with Ukraine, raising tensions between the two countries to their highest level since 2015, when Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Officials in Washington had said the US would move in troops at the request of “eastern flank allies” but other options, including sanctions and support for the Ukrainian military were preferred.

Feng Yujun, director of the Centre for Russian and Central Asian studies at Fudan University, said Russia’s troop deployment was a message from Moscow to the US to stop Ukraine from joining Nato.

Ukraine has pushed to join the Western security alliance but Russia is strongly opposed to Nato expansion.

Feng also said the US might not want to raise the security temperature in Europe because its energy was focused elsewhere.

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“The US is spending its main resources on the Indo-Pacific region against China, so it doesn’t want to create another [complicated situation] in Europe,” he said.

Beijing has sought to improve ties with both Moscow and Kyiv.

China and Russia have clearly strengthened political, economic and military relations in the last decade, with each country committing to defend the other against pressure from the United States. In late June, the two countries consolidated ties by renewing a 20-year-old friendship treaty.

And Chinese President Xi Jinping praised the China-Russia relationship as a “model example of a new type of international relations” that added “positive energy” to the world.

At the same time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described his country as a possible “bridge to Europe” for Chinese business.

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Ukraine has reached agreements with China to build airports, roads and railways, and thanked China for deliveries of Chinese Covid-19 vaccines.

It has also stayed silent about China’s alleged human rights abuses, withdrawing its signature from international demands that China allow independent observers into the country’s Xinjiang region to investigate reports of persecution of Uygurs and other Muslim minorities.

The allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang have concerned many European nations, and prompted sanctions and countersanctions on both sides. China denies the claims.

Wang Yiwei, an international relations expert from Renmin University in Beijing, said the tension on the Russia-Ukraine border was more an internal European issue and China was unlikely to weigh in.

“The Ukraine crisis is more an European issue that relates to the power play between Russia and several other European nations,” Wang said.

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“Another constraint is China’s interests in Europe, as Beijing is seeking to engage and build up a positive relationship with Europe. Beijing’s ties with Kyiv are fairly good, making Beijing unlikely to side with Moscow.”

Liu Weidong, an international relations researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said China would not intervene in the Ukraine crisis because it did not have the will or the military capacity to do so.

“I don’t think China could militarily support Russia if Moscow carried out military actions against Kyiv, and China doesn’t want to do so at all as such an action goes against China’s diplomatic principle of non-interference,” Liu said.

“Siding with either Moscow or Kyiv would ultimately end up hurting Beijing’s interests, so Beijing will only call for a humanitarian approach to resolve issues in an international arena like the United Nations.”

Liu also said Biden’s warning that the US might send troops to Ukraine sounded more like empty rhetoric rather than a solid promise, as the US public would not support any military action that undermined its interests.

Additional reporting by Ziwen Zhao