Four weeks ago, on 26 April 2023, Presidents Xi and Zelensky spoke on the phone for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February last year. This was an important first step in the direction of at least some cooperation between China and the West to work together on ending the war in Ukraine. But progress in this direction has been slow, and fighting in Ukraine has further intensified since. As China and the West have continued to shore up their respective alliances, Ukraine remains a major divisive issue but one that is becoming more and more a sideshow in the competition to shape a new geopolitical and geoeconomic order. What it’s about: When Xi and Zelensky spoke for almost an hour about their countries’ bilateral relations and the war in Ukraine, the Chinese president focused on the importance of dialogue and negotiation “to bring lasting peace and security to Europe” while his Ukrainian counterpart confirmed “a just and sustainable peace for Ukraine” was inextricably linked to restoring “the territorial integrity of Ukraine … within the 1991 borders.” This is the position that the G7 leaders’ communique supported as well, specifically calling on China “to support a comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on territorial integrity and the principles and purposes of the UN Charter, including through its direct dialogue with Ukraine.” The corresponding Xi'an Declaration of the China-Central Asia Summit was unsurprisingly less specific in this regard, but the six presidents nonetheless “reaffirmed their commitment to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and stressed that the territorial integrity and sovereignty of States cannot be undermined.” Why it matters: The war in Ukraine so far has cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, caused hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of damage to Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure, and contributed to a global cost-of-living crisis by driving up the prices of energy and food. Western sanctions on Russia and the increasingly tough stance by the G7 on sanctions evasion and circumvention have accelerated a trend of geoeconomic fragmentation that reinforces the geopolitical reconfiguration of the international order into a US- and an emerging China-led block. China’s consolidation of its relations with Central Asia at the summit of the presidents of all five Central Asian states with Xi Jinping in Xi’an indicates Beijing’s expanding influence in a region traditionally dominated by Moscow. Meanwhile, G7 leaders in Hiroshima re-committed to “de-risking, not de-coupling” in their quest for a common approach among them to economic resilience and security. China and the West both try to maintain some momentum in shaping their respective alliances, and the war in Ukraine continues to matter in this context. But it is increasingly becoming a distraction from a range of other issues that China and the West, as well as the rest of the world, are grappling with. There can be no question that the war needs to be brought to an end but given the broader stakes in the China-West relationship, managing it by containment in the absence of a credible peace plan is becoming a more likely approach—and one that will intensify the political and economic rivalry between China and the West. Our take: Bringing the war in Ukraine to a just and sustainable end will not be quick or easy, but China’s overt commitment to attempting a process of mediation is now evident with the visit last week by China’s special envoy on the issue, Li Hui, to Kyiv. While any Chinese mediation will play out only slowly, even if it is reluctantly supported by the West, both sides will continue in their efforts to reshape the international order in which a settlement of the war in Ukraine will eventually happen. The two rival summits in Xi’an and Hiroshima clearly demonstrate that the contest over the shape of this new order has taken centre-stage, and the war in Ukraine, and its two main protagonists, are turning into instruments of China and the West in their intensifying rivalry.To understand why and how this happened, we need to look at the bigger picture. A flurry of European visits to China sought to convey one key message to Beijing, namely that another ‘forever-war’ is in nobody’s interest, especially not one like that in Ukraine near the centre of Europe with the enormously destabilising consequences for the global economy and international peace and security. Although he was much derided for various comments during and after his trip to China, it seems as if President Macron of France was able to impress this point on President Xi. This was not Macron’s doing alone, and it is important to bear in mind that other ‘messengers’ played an important role as well—EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen travelled with Macron to China, and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock ...
