French President Emmanuel Macron to visit China in April on mission to help end Ukraine war
- Macron aims to enlist Beijing to pressure Moscow into a resolution of the conflict
- France has some incentives to offer but it won’t be easy, analyst says
Macron said in Paris on Saturday that peace was only possible if “the Russian aggression was halted, troops withdrawn and [the] territorial sovereignty of Ukraine and its people was respected”.
“The fact that China is engaging in peace efforts is a good thing,” he said. “China must help us put pressure on Russia so that it never uses chemical or nuclear weapons, [an effort] which China has already made, and that it stops its aggression as a precondition for talks.”
“Our president will certainly raise [the issue of] Ukraine when he goes to China,” she said in an academic forum at the University of Hong Kong on Thursday.
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China releases 12-point position paper on 1-year anniversary of Russian invasion of Ukraine
Song Luzheng, an international affairs researcher at Fudan University, said Macron could not wait until the second half of this year to make the trip.