Owen Matthews Owen Matthews

China is playing the long game over peace in Ukraine

Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference [Getty]

At the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi announced that his country was currently in consultations with ‘our friends in Europe’ over the framework of a peace proposal for Ukraine. It is to be laid out in full by President Xi Jinping on the first anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion – 24 February. Beijing’s peace initiative would, said Wang, underscore the ‘need to uphold the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and the UN Charter’ but at the same time ‘respect [the] legitimate security interests of Russia’.

On the face of it, it appears that Beijing is not saying anything new. Furthermore, both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron made it clear at the conference that there was no support for early peace talks and warned that the war would be a prolonged struggle. And yet China’s intervention is critically important to the conflict’s final outcome, not least because even a defeated Russia will remain powerful and dangerous unless Beijing steps in as both a guarantor of its security and a restraining hand on any future aggression.

China is the only country in the world in a position to offer Putin the real security guarantees that he demands as part of any post-war deal. And it is also the only country with serious diplomatic and strategic leverage over the Kremlin. Understandably, with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky insisting in a video-link speech to Munich that the security of his country and of Europe can only be assured by a total expulsion of Russian forces from every part of Ukraine, talk of reaching any kind of accommodation with Putin smacks of appeasement and defeatism. 

And yet there are no serious signs that Putin’s security regime faces any serious internal or external threats even after a year of war, sanctions and (according to Nato) losses of up to 200,000 troops killed, captured and critically injured.

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