'Improbable' China will negotiate end to Ukraine war
Kevin Rudd said anyone who thought China wanted to broker peace had 'rocks in their head'.
One of the world’s leading China experts, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Beijing has no interest in brokering an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.
His comments came after China boycotted Sunday’s meeting of National Security Advisers to discuss Ukraine’s proposed peace formula and the country’s Premier Li Qiang failed to meet President Volodymr Zelensky at Davos.
Rudd, who is fluent in Mandarin from his time as a diplomat in China, maintains frequent contact with the Chinese leadership and currently serves as Australia’s Ambassador to the United States.
He told an event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum that China’s priority was to have a ‘benign, supportive and useful relationship’ with Russia.
‘We should be deeply realistic about the fact that anyone who thinks that there’s going to be a negotiated outcome through Beijing on Ukraine with Russia in the foreseeable future, has got rocks in their head,’ Rudd told Politico on Thursday night.
‘It’s improbable.’
He said China’s decision to appoint an envoy to Ukraine was a possible step towards doing something in the future but that was no given.
‘But it is not currently on the radar and I don’t think prospectively is so,’ The Avoidable War author said.
China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin signed a no-limits partnership on the eve of Russia’s invasion.
While Xi has opposed Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons, he has not tried to curtail Putin’s military ambitions.
Russia has subsequently become more economically dependent on China, partly due to Western sanctions aimed at strangling Moscow’s ability to trade with Ukraine’s allies.
Rudd said Beijing would ‘double check and triple check’ its positions on Ukraine with the Kremlin.
‘If Xi Jinping looks at the world, he looks at Russia, he sees therefore, a neighbouring state, a massive common border with whom they’ve had a fractious relationship since the Sino-Soviet split of 1959,’ he said.
‘Anyone who thinks, therefore, that Xi Jinping is going to trade that in for playing happy families in Ukraine is wrong.’
Rudd called on the international community to continue to show its support for Ukraine and a democratic outcome.
‘Our challenge to democracies is to have the guts and the predisposition to stick this through to our Ukrainian brothers and sisters to at least have a secure country free from the threat of foreign invasion,’ Rudd said.
But Rudd’s government is under pressure at home for its lacklustre military support for Ukraine. It recently chose to strip faulty helicopters for parts and bury them rather than send them to Kyiv as the Ukrainians had asked.
China’s absence at the meeting of National Security Advisers hosted by Switzerland on Sunday was perceived as a snub to Ukraine, particularly after Li avoided a meeting with Zelensky. China last year attended one of the rounds of meetings of security advisers in Jeddah.
Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak said after Sunday’s talks that China needed to be a part of the peace process.
‘Of course we invited China,’ he said.
‘We will continue to invite [China], for us [it’s] important that China will be at the table.
‘And we’re looking at, in the future China will participate because it’s an important [influential] country.’
But Rudd’s comments underline Ukraine’s year of danger, having made little progress on the battlefield and facing the prospect of a re-elected Donald Trump who has voiced a quick end to the war in Europe.
Western officials believe that Putin is adopting an ‘outlast-the-West’ strategy and will not make any overtures on negotiations until the decision of US voters is known in November.