As long as China stays away, Ukraine will have a chance to win.
Russia has many more people, a larger economy and a more powerful army than Ukraine. According to all rules, it was supposed to destroy Ukraine at the beginning of the war. The fact that this did not happen, the fact that the war has been going on for the second year, and Kyiv has a good chance to regain lost positions, is largely explained by the fact that Ukraine has many allies, while Russia does not. Max Booth, Washington Post columnist, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes about this in a column for The Washington Post.
The United States and Europe have pledged approximately $100 billion in military and economic aid to Ukraine since the Russian invasion, according to estimates by the Kiel Institute for World Economics. This includes increasingly sophisticated military hardware, from Patriott air defense systems to the Leopard 2 and M1A2 Abrams tanks announced last week.
Also read: Leopard vs Challenger vs Abrams tanks: Comparison of combat power and delivery capabilities
Russia also needs foreign aid. Its troops are running out of everything: from artillery shells to drones and missiles. But currently, only two known rogue countries — Iran and North Korea — are ready to provide the Kremlin with military equipment. For the rest, Ukraine is a priority.
Russia's largest absent military supplier is China, the world's largest exporter of high-tech goods and the fourth largest arms exporter. Beijing could play the same role for Russia that the United States plays for Ukraine. If this happened, the chances of a Russian victory would increase exponentially. But that didn't happen, suggesting that in practice there are clear limits to the “boundless” friendship that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping proclaimed just weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
Xi is trying to balance between the West and Russia, thereby creating potential opportunities for the Biden administration.
Read also: NYT: Xi Jinping indicated to Putin where the limits of their “boundless” friendship
Beijing was happy to continue trade with Russia on favorable terms. China and India replaced Europe in the ranking of the main buyers of Russian oil and gas, which fell in price due to Western sanctions. Instead, according to researchers at the Silverado Policy Accelerator, China has become the Kremlin's largest source of imports — particularly semiconductors, which Russia needs to make both civilian and military equipment.
Due to the fact that Apple and Samsung stopped selling smartphones to Russia, China captured 70 percent of the Russian market in the third quarter of 2022. This bilateral trade indirectly subsidizes Putin's war effort — and, in the case of microchips, gives Russia the ability to manufacture weapons.
But we should not forget that China also had strong economic relations with Ukraine before the invasion. Indeed, as my colleague at the Council on Foreign Relations, Zhongyuan Zuoi Liu, noted: “By 2019, China replaced Russia as Ukraine's largest trading partner, becoming the largest importer of Ukrainian barley and iron ore, while Ukraine overtook the United States as the largest exporter of corn to China.”
Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told me that China would benefit from a prolonged war in Ukraine, as it would divert the West from China, which would receive low-cost energy supplies from Russia prices
Perhaps so, but China is not happy about the economic disruption caused by the Russian invasion. As the largest lender to low-income countries, China has to worry about getting payments from those countries whose economies have been hit by soaring commodity prices.
Also Read: SCMP: China Should Revisit “ boundless friendship” with Russia in 2023, it has lost its meaning
Chinese diplomats privately told Europeans that Xi did not know about the Russian invasion in advance and had to urgently evacuate 6,000 Chinese citizens in Ukraine. Xi has also publicly expressed “questions and concerns” about the Russian invasion and told Putin that the use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable.
Xi is an unsentimental practitioner of realpolitik, so he does not want to be on the side of a country that may lose.
Based on conversations with Chinese officials, the Financial Times reported that “China now thinks it likely that Russia will not succeed in defeating Ukraine, so Moscow will emerge from this conflict significantly weakened economically and politically.”
In other words, a defeated Russia may not be a very useful future ally for China, a country that already has few friends in the world. And China, as the world's largest trading power, cannot afford to find itself in the kind of isolation that Russia has driven itself into.
Read also: The war between Ukraine and Russia: why China chose this position
This helps explain why Beijing is reaching out to Europe and trying to ease hostilities with the United States by, for example, suspending one of its most pernicious wolf-warrior diplomats.
In an intriguing article in this month's Foreign Policy, two academics from The Stimson Center — former intelligence officer Robert A. Manning and China expert Yun Sun — argued that the Biden administration should take advantage of Xi's ambivalence about the war to distract him from Russia.
They suggested that China's offer to mediate in the Ukraine crisis should be investigated, and that the United States has nothing to lose by considering the possibility of opening up new opportunities for US-China cooperation on Ukraine.
Paul Geer >, a 30-year CIA veteran and former national intelligence officer for East Asia, told me he agreed that such a “potential opportunity” existed.
“Putin has put Xi in an awkward position, if not in the face of a real threat. But the question is, what can Washington offer as a “quid pro quo”? Beijing is not going to side with us against Moscow simply because it is the right thing to do. What is the profit from this for China?”, – said Geer.
There is a drawback — and a rather significant one: the growing hostility of the United States towards China. Continuing what Donald Trump started, President Biden is stepping up economic pressure on China, including blocking exports of cutting-edge microchips and the equipment to make them. It creates the impression that the goal of US policy is not only to counter China's military threat, but, as Financial Times columnist Gideon Rahman pointed out, to stop China's economic growth.
Read also: The road to there is no Russian victory – Financial Times
To get China to cooperate more on the war in Ukraine and other pressing issues such as North Korea, Geer believes the US should convince the Chinese that it is at least as interested in the potential for peaceful coexistence and strategic cooperation as it is in pursuing systemic strategic rivalry But in the current climate of rising tensions, that is an “extremely difficult task”.
Also read: Probability of US military conflict with China 'very high,' top Republican congressman says
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Therefore, it is doubtful that the United States will be able to convince China to become a partner in ending the war in Ukraine. But at least the Biden administration can continue to pressure China not to provide Russia with military equipment. As long as China stays away, Ukraine will have a chance to win.
See special topic: 20 countries called on Austria to prevent Russia from entering the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Vienna they emphasize that they “cannot do otherwise”. One in two Germans supports providing Ukraine with main battle tanks – poll But most are still in favor of stepping up diplomatic efforts to end the war. Ukrainian soldiers will complete training at the Patriot air defense system before the specified deadline Fighters are ahead of schedule. Mykolaiv ports are 90% ready to participate in the export of grain from Ukraine – Kim The only nuance is Russia's consent. Support for the war in Ukraine is growing among Russians – Levada Center According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, about 130,000 Russians have already died in the war in Ukraine in a year.
