Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and close ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, is due to visit Beijing on Tuesday for a meeting with Xi Jinping, in a high-profile trip symbolising the widening gulf between the US and China over the war in Ukraine.
US officials spent the weekend reiterating their concerns that Beijing is considering sending lethal weapons to Russia, amid China’s attempts to position itself as a peacemaker and deny that it would provide arms to Moscow.
Speaking to ABC News on Sunday, Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser, said the US was “watching closely” for any such shipment, which Beijing “hadn’t taken off the table” as a possibility.
William Burns, the director of the CIA, said in an interview with CBS News on Sunday that the US was “seriously concerned should China provide lethal equipment to Russia”.
“We don’t have evidence of a final decision to do that … all we’re trying to emphasise is the importance of not doing that,” Burns said.
On Friday, China published a 12-point “position paper” on the war in Ukraine, calling for peace and positioning itself as a neutral peacemaker in the conflict. However, the paper reiterated Beijing talking points that criticised the use of sanctions and “expanding military blocs”, an apparent reference to Nato. China has echoed Russia’s claim that the war in Ukraine was provoked by Nato’s expansion close to Russia’s borders.
The paper also urged all parties to refrain from nuclear escalation, a position that Beijing shares with the US and other western leaders.
China has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but has also tried to position itself as a peacemaker. Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, has said that China lacks credibility for such a role.
The US’s increasingly vocal statements about China potentially sending weapons to Russia came after Der Spiegel reported last week that the Russian military was in negotiations with Xi’an Bingo Intelligent Aviation Technology, a Chinese drone manufacturer, to produce kamikaze drones for Russia. The company denied having any business dealings with Russia.
“China’s policy to the war is the policy of declaring neutrality, supporting Putin, and paying no price,” says Steve Tsang, the director of the Soas China Institute in London. With the repeated public statements about sending weapons to Russia, the US may be trying to make clear to the Chinese that providing dual-use technology, which could have military applications, would be damaging to Chinese interests. “It is never crystal clear to the Chinese what will trigger sanctions,” said Tsang.
The US is trying to remove any doubt. Military assistance to Russia “will come at real costs to China”, Sullivan said on Sunday.
Western sanctions would cause “colossal damage both economically and politically to Xi’s leadership”, said Yu Jie, a senior research fellow on China at the Chatham House thinktank.
US politicians are increasingly unified in their opposition to Beijing, which will be on show at a House of Representatives committee meeting on Tuesday on dealing with the strategic threat posed by China.
Beijing is keen to reset its ties with Europe, an important trading partner. Chinese exports to the EU were worth €472bn (£416bn) in 2021. Last year China’s economic growth was just 3%, the worst since 1976 and a figure that Xi is keen to boost by opening up China’s borders and restoring economic relations with important trading partners. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and Charles Michel, president of the European Council, are expected to visit Beijing in the first half of this year.
President Joe Biden has dismissed China’s peace plan as containing nothing “beneficial to anyone other than Russia”. However, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said that “the fact that China is engaging in peace efforts is a good thing”.
Bobo Lo, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said Washington’s increasingly vocal warnings about China’s support for Russia is an attempt to tell Europe that “Beijing may seem to be playing nice, but it hasn’t changed its stripes”.
That much was clear when China blocked the G20 from issuing a joint statement condemning the war in Ukraine on Saturday.
Xi’s meeting with Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, is seen internationally as a sign of where China’s sympathies lie. Last week China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, told his Belarusian counterpart that China would support Belarus in opposing any “illegal” sanctions on Minsk. China has not responded to calls from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to have a meeting with Xi to discuss China’s proposals.
In the coming months, Xi is expected to visit Putin in Moscow.
