02/25/2023 1:47 pm (act. 02/25/2023 1:50 pm)
Biden warns of China’s Ukraine peace plan ©APA/AFP
US President Joe Biden finds the idea of China getting involved in negotiations on the outcome of the war in Ukraine irrational. Of the peace plan presented by Beijing, he told the ABC news channel on Friday (local time): “The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, applauds him, how can he be good then?” If China’s plan were implemented, it would benefit no one but Russia.
However, Biden is currently not assuming that Beijing will provide Moscow with large arms deliveries for the war in Ukraine. In an interview with ABC News broadcast on Friday night (local time), Biden said: “I don’t expect a big move from China to arm Russia.” Earlier, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS that Washington was concerned “based on the information we have” that China was considering “providing lethal support” to Moscow in the Ukraine war. When asked on CBS what that “deadly support” included, the Secretary of State said “everything from ammunition to the weapons themselves”.
Blinken’s remarks raised concerns among many European politicians. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said supplying arms to Russia “would cross a red line” from the EU’s point of view. He also said this to top Chinese foreign politician Wang Yi in Munich. However, the diplomat assured him that Beijing “had no intention of doing so”. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin on Monday denied plans to supply Russia with weapons in the Ukraine war, calling them “false information”.
French President Emmanuel Macron plans to visit Beijing in early April. One of the goals is to ask the People’s Republic for support in ending the war in Ukraine, Macron told reporters in Paris. “The fact that China is committed to peace is a good thing,” he told an agricultural fair. “China must help us to put pressure on Russia to never use chemical or nuclear weapons, which China has already done, and stop its aggression as a condition of the talks,” Macron said. China has submitted a 12-point document calling for a ceasefire and peace talks.
In the interview on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden also repeated his statement that he would not deliver F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine for the time being because the Ukrainian president does not need them at the moment. “He doesn’t need an F-16 right now.” From the US military’s point of view, there is currently no reason to make the fighters available.
But it is not possible to know what will be needed in one, two or three years, the president replied when asked if he ruled out the delivery of fighter jets for the future. “I’m ruling that out for now,” Biden said.
Earlier, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the fighter jets were not a “key capability” for Ukraine’s current needs. Biden and Zelenskyy exchanged views on this, Sullivan said. When asked by reporters about such conversations between him and Zelenskyy on Friday, Biden only replied, according to journalists at the White House press office, that they were private conversations.
According to British intelligence experts, the Russian military has likely exhausted its stockpile of Iranian drones. This is likely because there have been no reports of the use of small unmanned aerial vehicles in Ukraine since February 15, the Ministry of Defense in London said on Saturday. However, between late January and early February, the Ukrainian military shot down at least 24 of the Shahed-136 expendable drones.
“Russia will probably try to get supplies,” he said. “While the weapons don’t have a good track record of destroying their intended targets, Russia likely sees them as useful in distracting Ukraine’s air defenses from much more effective Russian cruise missiles.”
The British Ministry of Defense published daily information on the course of the war since the start of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine a year ago, citing intelligence information. In doing so, the British government wants to counter the Russian portrayal and keep the Allies in line. Moscow accuses London of a disinformation campaign.
Meanwhile, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov called the new G7 sanctions against Russia ineffective. “Does anyone really believe that in this way our country can be persuaded to abandon its independent course and deviate from its embarked path of building a multipolar world based on the principle of indivisible security, international law and the UN Charter,” he said, citing in a post on the embassy’s Facebook page. Antonov called the new sanctions “reckless” and aimed at tormenting Russia.