Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said on Monday that his government has no intention of deploying troops to help secure the borders of Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday that Russia would insist on its 2022 proposal to “guarantee” Ukraine’s security with forces from the entire United Nations Security Council (UNSC), which includes Russia and China.
Ukraine rejected the notion of Russia having so much control over its security in 2022, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeated that rejection on Friday, specifically scoffing at the notion of trusting either Russia or its close ally China.
“Why isn’t China one of the security guarantors? We don’t need guarantors that don’t help Ukraine. Beijing assisted Russia by opening access to the drone market. We don’t need guarantors who don’t help Ukraine, and didn’t help Ukraine at the moment when we really needed it,” Zelensky said on Friday.
On Saturday, Germany’s Die Welt reported that Beijing was “willing to send soldiers to Ukraine as part of a peace mission,” but only if the peacekeepers were “deployed on the basis of a mandate from the United Nations.”
Die Welt spoke with several European Union (EU) diplomats who had mixed feelings about the idea. On one hand, they thought expanding the portfolio of nations guaranteeing Ukraine’s security could be desirable, and China’s involvement could mollify Russia’s apprehensions about allowing a force composed largely of NATO members and their close allies to operate near Russia’s borders.
On the other hand, some of the EU diplomats said they were worried about “the danger that China wants to spy on Ukraine,” and could take “a clearly pro-Russian position” in the event of a future conflict.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Lin Jian dismissed the Die Welt report as inaccurate on Monday.
“This information is false. China’s stance on the Ukrainian issue is clear and consistent,” he said.
Lavrov repeated Russia’s demand for a UNSC force during an interview with NBC News on Sunday, although he seemingly modified the proposal slightly by calling for the “guarantors” of Ukraine’s security to be “neutral,” “non-aligned with any military bloc,” and “non-nuclear.” This would seem to rule out Russia, China, and the United States, all of which are nuclear powers.
Lavrov hinted that Germany and Turkey would be among the candidates for securing Ukraine’s borders that were acceptable to Moscow.
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