Russia doesn’t want to proceed with China’s peace proposal “for now,” according to the Kremlin, as Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to pursue his original “goals” for the war in Ukraine.
“For now, we do not see any prerequisites for putting the issue on a peace track,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday, per state media. “The special military operation continues. We are moving towards achieving the goals that were set.”
China unveiled a 12-point plan for the “Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis” that called for a ceasefire and the lifting of economic sanctions on Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky adopted a tone of guarded courtesy — “the fact that China started talking about Ukraine is not bad,” he said Friday — but China’s failure to call for Russia to relinquish any Ukrainian territory in exchange for the proposed concessions drew sharper criticism from his aides and Western officials.
“Any ‘peace plan’ with ceasefire only and, as a result, a new delimitation line and continued occupation of [Ukrainian] territory isn’t about peace, but about freezing the war, [Ukrainian] defeat, next stages of [Russian] genocide,” Zelensky adviser Mikhail Podolyak tweeted in response.
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Ukrainian officials welcomed instead the passage of a resolution from the United Nations General Assembly that backed “a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.” This resolution (which passed Wednesday on a 141-7 vote, although China and 31 other countries abstained) also demanded that “the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders” before calling for a ceasefire.
“Obviously, any new peace proposals should now be aligned with demands set forth by the Resolution,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told the United Nations Security Council on Friday in a thinly veiled message to China. “We invite all countries from every corner of the world to facilitate implementation of the Resolution and the Peace Formulas. We need to act jointly and quickly.”
The resolution passed after the General Assembly voted down amendments that would have removed language characterizing the war as an act of Russian aggression and would have called for Western countries to stop sending weapons to Ukraine. Kuleba applauded that measure and warned China not to reinforce Russia’s military.
“Arming a country that defends itself from aggression is absolutely legitimate and is an act of defending the U.N. Charter,” he said. “On the contrary, helping an aggressor is illegitimate and defies the Charter. Any supply of weapons or military equipment to Russia means complicity in the trampling of the U.N. Charter. If you give weapons to Russia, you commit a crime.”
Chinese officials say they “will not” send weapons to Russia, but U.S. and Western officials have said that Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping is weighing a request from Moscow.
“We have begun to collect intelligence suggesting that China is considering the provision of lethal equipment,” CIA Director William Burns told CBS in a Sunday broadcast. “We don’t have evidence of a final decision to do that today. We don’t have evidence that there’s actually been a transfer. And so all we’re trying to emphasize is the importance of not doing that.”
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China accused the United States of “fueling the fight with more weaponry” on Monday while protesting new U.S. sanctions on Chinese companies accused of assisting Russia.
“The U.S. has been pouring weapons into one side of the conflict, thus prolonging the fight and making peace elusive, while spreading disinformation that China would supply weapons to Russia and sanctioning Chinese companies under that pretext,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Monday. “This is out-and-out hegemonism and double standard and absolute hypocrisy.”
