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Alex Lo

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you are serious about negotiating for peace, you do it behind closed doors, away from the public eye. The converse is also true, that is, if you are not serious about negotiating, you talk to reporters instead.
That’s why month after month, you have Western leaders engaged in megaphone diplomacy through the media by claiming that Beijing could end Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine if it would just do it.
You have Finnish President Alexander Stubb claiming on Bloomberg, “Russia is so dependent on China right now one phone call from President Xi Jinping would solve this crisis.”
One phone call, as opposed to five? It will probably take more than a few phone calls when Putin’s political and probably personal survival depends on some versions of “victory” that he may plausibly claim in Ukraine.
Repeatedly, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has called on Beijing to help stop Putin – what with phone calls or a magic wand? – while castigating China for not taking part in the Ukraine Peace Summit, held in Switzerland last month.
But, as many independent critics have pointed out, what was the point of a peace conference when the side that started the war wasn’t even invited. This was despite Moscow’s repeated messages that it was ready to talk peace.
Well, you could do that if the West were winning or if Putin were ready to admit defeat. But that’s far from the case with Russia at the moment.
To highlight the lack of seriousness regarding the “peace” summit, Blinken’s own boss, President Joe Biden, who is supposedly Kyiv’s biggest supporter, didn’t bother to show up.
That brings us back to Ukraine. Why is its Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba currently in Beijing, his first trip since the outbreak of the war in February 2022?
The short answer is Donald Trump. The longer answer is Biden and Kamala Harris – the former is a rock, the latter are a hard place.
If Trump becomes president again, he could withdraw American support and pass all the weapons destined for Ukraine to Israel. In that case, Kyiv risks decisively losing the war and facing dismemberment.
History then repeats itself as the old sad partition fate of Poland in the 19th century awaits modern Ukraine. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel might have been more right than she realised when she said Putin uses 19th century methods of statecraft in the 21st century.
But if Harris, Biden’s heir apparent, wins the presidency and continues support, Ukraine will run out of men eventually in a prolonged war of attrition. Like the human body, the body politic can only bleed so much before it gives up. Quite simply, Russia has a lot more men than Ukraine to serve as cannon fodder.
Against all this is that the European and American people are suffering from war fatigue. Americans don’t understand why Washington is committed to defending someone else’s borders but not its own (with migrants “invading” their southern border). Europeans are tired of sacrificing their own economies and standards of living to support Ukraine.
Belatedly, Kyiv is waking up to the Faustian bargain it has made with Washington. Whether the Americans now withdraw or continue their diplomatic and military support, Ukraine is staring at disaster one way or another. So it needs to hedge its bets with Beijing. That may give it some leverage over Washington and Moscow as it too can practise “triangulated” diplomacy.
Hence Ukraine’s peace overture to Beijing now, and peace signals from Russia to the Europeans, though these are inevitably under-reported or ignored completely by the mainstream Anglo-American media. Political leaders in Washington and Brussels want more war, not just in Eastern Europe, but to spread it to the Asia-Pacific region too.
Their public statements notwithstanding, the last thing they want is a separate peace made between Ukraine and Russia, with China serving as the main mediator. That would defeat the whole purpose of their failing proxy war to destroy the Putin regime.


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Why Ukraine’s foreign minister decided to visit China right now

Ukrainian policemen and locals check the site of a Russian rocket strike in the city of Chuhuiv in the Kharkiv region, northeastern Ukraine. Photo: EPA-EFE

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Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv in June. Photo: Reuters

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Ukrainian policemen and locals check the site of a Russian rocket strike in the city of Chuhuiv in the Kharkiv region, northeastern Ukraine, on July 19. Photo: EPA-EFE

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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy attends a cabinet meeting chaired by UK prime minister, Keir Starmer on July 19. Starmer announced a crackdown on Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers used to skirt sanctions. Photo: Bloomberg

Opinion

World Opinion

With isolationist Trump on the White House horizon, Kyiv needs to ‘triangulate’ diplomatic pressure on Washington, Moscow and Beijing


With isolationist Trump on the White House horizon, Kyiv needs to ‘triangulate’ diplomatic pressure on Washington, Moscow and Beijing.


Ukraine

My Take

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

My Take | Why Ukraine’s foreign minister decided to visit China right now

With isolationist Trump on the White House horizon, Kyiv needs to ‘triangulate’ diplomatic pressure on Washington, Moscow and Beijing