Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine turns to China as potential mediator

The subtle signs that Ukraine is willing to engage diplomatically with Russia continue to increase. This week, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, traveled to China for the first time since Russia’s 2022 invasion to meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

“I am convinced that a just peace in Ukraine is in China's strategic interests, and China's role as a global force for peace is important,” Kuleba said during the meeting.

Following the meeting, the Ukrainian foreign ministry put out a statement saying that Kyiv was “ready to engage” with Russia if Moscow was prepared to do so “in good faith,” but that so far they had seen no indication that Russia was ready to do so.

The meeting between the two top diplomats follows reporting from earlier this month that Ukraine would be willing to invite Russian representatives to its next peace summit, which Kyiv hopes to organize for later this year.

Beijing was notably absent from the last summit in Switzerland in June, refusing to participate due to Moscow’s absence. Convincing Beijing to join the summits and endorse a version of Ukraine’s “peace formula” has been a key aim of President Volodymor Zelensky’s foreign policy.

When China released its own peace plan in February 2023, Ukraine’s reaction was cautiously optimistic, and more welcoming than the United States or Western partners were of the plan. Ukraine’s urgency to engage with China as a potential mediator has perhaps increased due to uncertainty over whether the U.S. and the West are really in it for the long term.

According to a New York Times report on the Kuleba-Wang meeting, Kyiv recognizes that a diplomatic process without Beijing will be unlikely to succeed, since China may be the only country with sufficient leverage over Moscow to push it to the table.

Moscow may also be willing to welcome Beijing as a player. “The message itself can be said to be in unison with our position," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in response to Kuleba's remarks about future negotiations. “You know that the Russian side has never refused to negotiate, has always maintained its openness to the negotiation process, but details are important here that you and I do not yet know."

The continued interest in mediating a peace between Ukraine and Russia is the latest sign of China’s efforts to become a diplomatic power. In the past two years, Beijing has seized opportunities to broker agreements between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and — this week — between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah, as it works to bolster this image.

The Chinese foreign minister is also scheduled to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting this weekend in Laos, where the two diplomats are expected to discuss the war in Ukraine.

In other diplomatic news related to the war in Ukraine:

— Support for a diplomatic solution to the war is also growing among the Ukrainian population. A survey conducted in May and published this week by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology showed that the share of Ukrainians open to making territorial concessions in exchange for an end to the war has tripled in the last year, from 10% to 32%.

Just over half of respondents (55%) said that Ukraine should not give up territory under any circumstances, ten percentage points lower than in any of the ten surveys that KIIS has asked this question since May 2022.

— The U.S. and the EU are close to reaching a deal that would divide a $50 billion loan to Ukraine equally between the two of them, according to Politico. The $50 billion loan is expected to be repaid by the interest accrued on seized Russian assets.

— Ukraine is confronting a labor shortage as mobilization efforts for the war intensify, according to The Washington Post.

“Online job portals in Ukraine say they have never advertised so many openings. Millions of Ukrainians moved abroad to escape Moscow’s brutal bombardment, and of those who stayed, hundreds of thousands of men have traded their jobs for military service,” the Post reports. “Now, with Kyiv ramping up its mobilization efforts, businesses expect that workers will be even harder to find, further straining Ukraine’s crippled economy.” It is the latest sign of the destructive impact the war has inflicted on the Ukrainian economy, which is increasingly reliant on foreign aid. One Ukrainian economist told the Post that “without Western financial aid, the Ukrainian economy would collapse.”

— Russia sentenced another journalist, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Alsu Kurmasheva, this week after a secret trial. Kurmasheva is a dual American-Russian citizen.

“Kurmasheva was convicted under Russia’s wartime fake-news law, which bans the broadcasting or posting of any information about the war in Ukraine other than official propaganda,” according to the Washington Post. She was also charged with failing to register as a foreign agent. Her conviction came the same day as that of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Unlike Gershkovich, Kurmasheva has not yet been declared to be wrongfully detained by the State Department, for reasons that the Post said “remain unclear.”

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that she was being "targeted by Russian authorities for her uncompromising commitment to speaking the truth and her principled reporting,” and that Washington continues “to make very clear that she should be released.”

U.S. State Department news:

In a Wednesday press briefing, Miller was asked about Kuleba’s statement that Ukraine was open to negotiations with Russia.

“They have always been ready for negotiations to reach a just and lasting peace, but that Vladimir Putin to date has shown no change to his war aims and has shown no real willingness for negotiations,” he said. “So our take on this continues to be what it has been for some time, which is that when it comes to diplomacy, nothing about Ukraine, without Ukraine.”