Ukraine Presses China to Help Seek End to War With Russia
A visit by the foreign minister of Ukraine to Guangzhou this week signals Kyiv’s desire to involve Beijing in peace talks that China has thus far largely snubbed.
Ukraine’s top diplomat met with China’s foreign minister on Wednesday in talks that signaled Kyiv’s increased willingness to pursue a diplomatic solution to the war with Russia and to have China play a more central role in the effort.
“I am convinced that a just peace in Ukraine is in China’s strategic interests,” Dmytro Kuleba said in a statement after a meeting with Wang Yi, the Chinese official, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. “China’s role as a global force for peace is important.”
Mr. Kuleba made clear that Ukraine attached conditions to such negotiations, saying it would only engage Russia when Moscow was “ready to negotiate in good faith.” He added: “No such readiness is currently observed on the Russian side.”
Mr. Kuleba is visiting China for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. His trip comes as Ukraine is slowly losing ground in the war and faces growing uncertainty about the level of support it will have from the West. Moscow and Kyiv briefly held peace talks in the spring of 2022 but they quickly broke down over critical issues.
For China, hosting Mr. Kuleba reflects the country’s ambition to play a bigger role in global security challenges as a counterweight to the United States. It also serves to rebut Western criticism of Beijing’s close alignment with Russia.
Mr. Wang said China was committed to finding a political solution to the crisis, adding that while the timing was not yet right, Moscow and Kyiv had “sent signals of their willingness to negotiate to varying degrees,” according to a readout from China’s Foreign Ministry.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told reporters Mr. Kuleba’s reported openness to negotiations with Russia was “in unison with our position” and added that Russia has never refused talks.
Ukrainian and Western officials reject the idea that Russia is open to good-faith peace talks. They describe the Kremlin’s frequent messages about negotiations as a propaganda ruse designed to obfuscate the Kremlin’s determination to force Ukraine to capitulate.
President Vladimir V. Putin’s cease-fire conditions — that Ukraine gives up four frontline regions that Russia partly controls, and that Kyiv pledges to never join the NATO military alliance — are a nonstarter for Ukraine, leaving little to no room for negotiations. Ukraine, for its part, wants to regain full control of its territory and to join NATO, which is anathema to Moscow.
China’s previous attempt to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, with a 12-point plan it put forward in 2023, was quickly dismissed by European leaders. Beijing had since eschewed a public role in the war, declining to participate in a Ukrainian-held peace summit in Switzerland last month because Russia was not invited.
The summit eventually failed to rally support from regional powers such as India and Saudi Arabia. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, recently said Ukraine aimed to hold a second peace summit later this year, ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, and that Russia should participate.
Beijing now may be calculating that the time is right to step in, partly based on a belief that Ukraine may be more realistic about how the war might end, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a foreign affairs think tank in Washington.
“The Chinese wanted to play the role of a peacemaker and they weren’t able to before because the timing was not mature, in that Ukraine still believed that it could prevail in winning the war on its own terms,” Ms. Sun said.
In Kyiv, there has been a growing understanding that peace talks without China’s participation “will not be meaningful,” said Natasha Butyrska, an expert on Ukrainian-Asian relations at the Kyiv-based New Europe Center, a foreign policy think tank.
“China is a country that can push Russia to engage in peace talks,” Ms. Butyrska said, adding that Mr. Kuleba’s visit partly aimed to secure Beijing’s participation in the second peace summit.
Ukraine wants to speed up peace talks partly because of the prospect of a Trump victory in the U.S. presidential election this autumn, she said. Mr. Trump’s vow to end the war quickly has raised fears in Kyiv that he would push for a peace deal that would allow Russia to keep the territory it occupies today and leave it in a position to attack Ukraine again.
The Ukrainian army is also on the back foot along a frontline stretching more than 600 miles, as Russian troops creep forward and capture towns. Although the vast majority of the population is adamantly opposed to Russia’s maximalist peace terms, there has been growing acceptance of the need for peace talks.
China is in a unique position to mediate because its top leader, Xi Jinping, has a good relationship with Mr. Putin. The two have met dozens of times as presidents of their countries. Beijing also has economic leverage over Moscow, said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a research group.
“In theory they can use that leverage to push Russia,” Mr. Gabuev said.
Zixu Wang and Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.