Green inclusive leadership, green policy, and pursuit of sustainability in natural resources: A firm-level analysis in context of Ukraine-Russia war

China is one of the major trading partners of Russia and Ukraine. The country depends upon Russia and China to import a few of the key strategic products from the mining, agriculture, and energy sectors. This study explores the association between green inclusive leadership, green policy, and the pursuit of sustainability in the iron-ore mining industry in China, against the backdrop of the Ukraine-Russia war. This also examines the role of green policy robustness in the relationship between green inclusive leadership and the pursuit of sustainability. Further, our study determines the magnitude of green inclusive leadership in sustainability. We used the cross-sectional data of 102 firms from the Iron-Ore Mining sector of the People Republic of China. This study employed hierarchal regression for empirical analysis. Our findings of hierarchal regression analysis highlight that green inclusive leadership significantly impacts the sustainability of the iron-ore mining firms, whereas green policies positively reinforce those impacts on the sustainability of the firms. Our findings substantiate the significant moderating role of green policy in reinforcing the impacts of green inclusive leadership on the sustainability of the firms. Our findings suggest that the presence of well well-enacted green policy can help firms to augment the impacts of green innovation leadership on sustainability. In a nutshell, our research offers insights into how the iron ore mining industry can navigate the possibility of using green innovation leadership to achieve sustainable development.