The Ukraine War and the Impossibility to Reach a Peace Deal: Could China’s Mediation Bring the War to an End?

Respect for the territorial integrity of other countries and noninterference in their domestic affairs has been a long-standing principle of Chinese foreign policy. Yet, China’s unwise intensification of its relationship with Russia, as has been demonstrated in the joint Xi-Putin statement on February 4, 2022, which famously has talked about a relationship that has “no limits”, has already begun to haunt Beijing (“Parsing the meaning of the Xi-Putin meeting on the sidelines of the Beijing Olympics,” NPR (Feb. 8, 2022): https://www.npr.org/2022/02/08/1079112810/parsing-the-meaning-of-the-xi-putin-meeting-on-the-sidelines-of-the-beijing-olym ). While Beijing might not have minded some tension between Russia and the West, China was not interested in the outbreak of war and being associated with a bloodthirsty quasi-ally. It remained unclear, however, whether Xi knew about Putin’s invasion plan and agreed with it when they met in Beijing in early February. While, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration passed some of their intelligence information to the Chinese to make China put pressure on Moscow to refrain from an invasion, Beijing might not have trusted the information it received from Washington.