Senior Colonel Zhou Bo says the war in Ukraine will accelerate the geopolitical shift from West to East
If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, is the enemy of my friend also my enemy? Not necessarily. Or so China’s thinking goes when it comes to the raging Russian-Ukranian war. On the one hand China is Russia’s strategic partner. On the other, China is the largest trading partner of Ukraine. Beijing therefore tries painstakingly to strike a balance in its responses to the war between two of its friends. It expresses understanding of Russia’s “legitimate concerns” over NATO’s expansion, while underlining that “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected”.
Such carefully calibrated neutrality may not be what the warring parties really want, but it is acceptable to both. If China joins the West in condemning Russia, it will be much applauded in Washington and most European capitals. But it will lose Russia’s partnership. And it is only a matter of time before America takes on China again. The Biden administration’s policy towards my country is “extreme competition” that stops just short of war.
Obviously, the confict in Ukraine has done tremendous damage to Chinese interests, including its Belt and Road initiative in Europe. But Beijing sympathises with Moscow’s claim that the root cause of the confict is NATO’s inexorable expansion eastward after the fall of the Soviet Union. All Russian leaders since Mikhail Gorbachev have warned of the consequences of such expansion. Russia feels that it cannot allow its Ukrainian brethren to leave Russkiy mir—the Russian world—to join another camp. If NATO looks like Frankenstein’s monster to Russia, with new additions here and there, Vladimir Putin probably believes he must slay the creature.
The future of Europe is not hard to fathom. Mr Putin’s all-out war against Ukraine has failed. Precisely because of that, he will fight until he can declare some sort of “victory”. Presumably this will involve Ukraine’s acceptance that Crimea is part of Russia, its promise not to join NATO and the independence of the two “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. The challenge is whether Russian troops are able to control Donbas after occupying it.