Setting the scene a few hours before an exchange between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, the United States said Thursday that China would expose itself to reprisals if it were to “support Russian aggression” against Ukraine.
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“We are concerned that they plan to directly assist Russia with military equipment that would be used in Ukraine. President Biden will speak to President Xi tomorrow, and make it clear to him that China will bear responsibility for any act to support Russian aggression, and that we will not hesitate to impose costs on it,” the leader said Thursday. of American diplomacy Antony Blinken.
“We see with concern that China is considering giving Russia direct military assistance,” he added.
It is the clearest warning issued by the United States to China since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, and it comes a few hours before a conversation between the American and Chinese presidents, scheduled for Friday.
This meeting, the fourth between the two leaders since Joe Biden is president, aims to “keep the channels of communication open between the United States and the People’s Republic of China”, said in a press release the spokeswoman of the US executive Jen Psaki.
This is a constant concern of the American president, for whom the United States and China are certainly destined to engage in ruthless competition, but by maintaining sufficient dialogue so that this confrontation is not a source of chaos at the international level.
The two leaders will discuss this “competition” between Washington and Beijing “as well as Russia’s war against Ukraine and other issues of common interest,” said Jen Psaki.
The United States therefore raised their voices even further, they who had already considered “deeply worrying” the position of “China’s alignment with Russia” in the face of the war in Ukraine, after a very long recent meeting in Rome between the US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Communist Party’s top diplomat.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, the Chinese communist regime, prioritizing its relationship with Moscow and sharing with Russia a deep hostility towards the United States, has refrained from calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw his troops from Ukraine.
But the ‘boundless friendship’ professed by Beijing and Moscow is being tested by the war in Ukraine, with President Xi Jinping’s regime appearing to have been taken aback by Ukrainian resistance to the Russian offensive and the strength of sanctions Western.
Beyond the question of possible military assistance to Russia, Washington does not want China to help Moscow mitigate the impact of these unprecedentedly harsh sanctions, which are supposed to strangle the Vladimir regime financially and economically. Putin.
“President Biden’s priority (during the conversation) will be to ask China not to give Russia the means to compensate for international sanctions, and not to send equipment for the Russian war machine to Ukraine”, Ryan Hass, an expert at the Brookings Research Institute and former adviser to President Barack Obama on China, told AFP.
Xi Jinping for his part “must arbitrate between various priorities. He attaches great importance to the partnership with Russia, but he does not want to undermine relations with the West”, on which China depends “for its access to certain advanced technologies”, he underlines.
“The interests of China and Russia are not aligned. Putin wants to dynamite the international system while President Xi sees himself as the architect of a new international order”, further analyzes the expert.