On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke on the phone for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. According to Zelensky’s spokesman, the two spoke for an hour: Chinese state media published a summary according to which Xi spoke of “lasting peace” and “respect for sovereignty”, without however ever naming Russia or using the word “war”, something it has already refused to do in the past, preferring a more generic “crisis”.
Xi he said to Zelensky that China “does not intend to throw fuel on the fire or profit” from the war in Ukraine and that he believes that the time is ripe to “solve the crisis through politics”. The Chinese president did not explicitly assure Zelensky that China would not supply Russia with weapons, but his words were interpreted as a signal that the Chinese government does not intend to provide direct military assistance to the Russians.
The talks, however, were considered important even for the fact that they took place, due to the ambiguous positions taken by China regarding the war. In fact, the Chinese government has very solid economic and political relations with Russia, and in recent months it has never explicitly come out to condemn the invasion. While defining itself as neutral, China has continuously refused to call what is happening in Ukraine a “war” (official documents refer to a “crisis” in Ukraine), and has never condemned the atrocities and war crimes committed by the soldiers Russians against civilians in Ukraine.
Zelensky called the call “long and significant,” and said it should give “a strong impetus to the development of bilateral relations” between China and Ukraine. The call was accompanied by two announcements: the first is that two years after the death of the last Ukrainian ambassador to China, a new one has been appointed, who will soon leave for the country. The second is that China will send an envoy to Ukraine who will have the task of “conducting an in-depth communication” on the “political resolution of the Ukrainian crisis”: this is Li Hui, former special representative of the Chinese government for Eurasian affairs and former ambassador Chinese in Russia.
I had a long and meaningful phone call with 🇨🇳 President Xi Jinping. I believe that this call, as well as the appointment of Ukraine’s ambassador to China, will give a powerful impetus to the development of our bilateral relations.
— Volodymyr Zelensky (@ZelenskyyUa) April 26, 2023
For some time China has been proposing itself as a “mediator” within the conflict: in February it had published a plan to start peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, which however was judged rather generic and weak.
At the end of March, Xi had gone to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin: there were no great expectations about the visit and in fact it had ended with only economic agreements and nothing more (above all, no military aid had been announced, as instead had been assumed in the previous months).
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby he said that the United States – China’s main rival at the international level – “are happy that Xi and Zelensky have spoken to each other” because “we have been asking for some time that China listen to the Ukrainian point of view”. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova he said instead that Russia “recognizes China’s readiness to make efforts to advance the negotiation process”, but that under the current conditions a political resolution of the war is unlikely.
– Listen also: Could China contribute to peace in Ukraine?, with Francesca Ghiretti