China hammers home its message of US blame for Ukraine war to domestic audience
- State media publishes multiple commentaries accusing Washington’s Nato ambitions of sparking the conflict
- Observers noted the difference between Beijing’s domestic rhetoric and its international response to the Ukraine crisis
“Nato has become a tool for the United States to practice its hegemony,” the commentary said. “The US-led Nato has for a long time created turbulence around Russia, including starting ‘colour revolutions’.”
The article, which accused the US of “directing and acting” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was the first in a series planned by the newspaper to focus on blaming Washington for the war in Ukraine.
It appeared one day after the military newspaper PLA Daily published the last of its six-part series on the “despicable role by the United States and the West in the Ukrainian crisis”.
The final instalment focused on the unproven claims that the Pentagon was developing biochemical weapons in Ukraine and also returned to China’s own coronavirus lab leak theory – that the pandemic may have originated in the US.
For more than a year, Chinese state media and diplomats have argued the virus may have originated from the Fort Detrick Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, to counter the hypothesis that it may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.