Per the Ukrainethese preceding the anniversary of the invasion, Friday February 24, are the days of rhetoric: Speeches that the US presidents fall into this category Joe Biden and Russian Vladimir Putin tomorrow, respectively in Warsaw and in front of the Duma, the soldiers of the ‘special military operation’ will be present – without foreign guests.
And it also has a substantially rhetorical value the mission, today, in Kiev, by President Biden, certainly not improvised ‘last minute’, but obviously kept secret until the last minute. The comings and goings to and from Kiev these days almost seem to want to create the impression that, despite the conflict, Ukraine is rediscovering its normality.
Within a week, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky he was in London and Brussels and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Munich in civilian clothes; and Kiev has visitors every day (or almost): Swedish premier Ulf Kristersson, current president of the EU Council, Biden, soon the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni are just the latest in a long list.
As expected, Biden’s trip to Kiev and Warsaw may well have an anti-Chinese valenceas if to shield the impact of the Chinese peace plan on Ukraine, the announcement of which, anticipated in Munich by the head of Chinese diplomacy Wang Yi, is expected on Friday.
Beijing has perhaps taken on the break Western diplomacy, after it had kept quiet on the Ukrainian crisis for a year, refusing to assume a role of mediationwithout condemning the invasion, but declaring himself in favor of respecting the territorial integrity of the countries, a principle to be applied “without double standards” – a way of saying that Taiwan is China.
The ‘balloon war’ which broke out at the beginning of the month with the overflight of US territory by a Chinese probe – a spy balloon, for the United States; a weather probe for Beijing – and the subsequent downing, he added an element of tensionprobably only cyclical, to the geo-political, economic and commercial dispute between the US and China.
The visit that the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinkplanned in Beijing has thus been postponed sine the. And Blinken has just added another link to the chain of US-China disputes: the alleged supply to the Russia of drones and other war material, as Iran and North Korea do, or would do. Blinken and Wang then met in Munich, on the sidelines of that conference which was a triumph of pro-Western Ukraine rhetoric: none of the points of the dispute have been resolved, but at least the dialogue resumed.
Wang went to Moscow from Munich: the rapprochement between China and Russia in the last year is evident, with Xi and Putin united by the desire for a new world order in function of US anti-hegemony. And it is also likely that Wang wants to probe Putin’s reaction to the puzzle of Xi’s peace plan.
After a year long tugging on Xi’s coat to assume a mediating role after the invasion of Ukraine, Biden now seems worried that he actually does it: if China wants to take the stage, the US will raise smokescreens around it. But if Beijing were to formulate proposals that satisfy Russian security concerns and the protection of Ukrainian territorial integrity, it will be difficult to turn a deaf ear.