Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unusual and largely forgotten eight-year-old promise that China would defend Ukraine in the event of a nuclear attack is drawing renewed attention following Russia’s invasion of its Eastern European neighbor.
China’s promise of unspecified security guarantees to Ukraine in 2013 echoes commitments that nuclear-weapon states, including China, have long made to non-nuclear states, assurances that the United States, Britain, and Russia had previously also given directly to Ukraine for renouncing Soviet weapons. era. . Yet Beijing appears to be promising more than in past commitments, and why it chose Ukraine for such an arrangement has baffled nuclear experts ever since.
Now its existence seems to further confuse Beijing’s political stance in the context of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine and Moscow’s warning last month to raise the alert level of its nuclear forces.
“It’s a nuclear weapon state’s promise to stand up for a non-nuclear weapon state that is threatened by a nuclear weapon state,” says Gregory Kulacki, a Japan-based analyst who covers nuclear issues and China for the nonprofit Union of the World. . Concerned scientists. “It means something, and China should point it out,” he says.
When it was signed, China’s bilateral security pledge to Ukraine looked unprecedented and immediately raised questions about whether Mr. Xi, then freshly in charge, intended to change established military protocols. China is believed to have only one formal alliance, a 1961 treaty with North Korea that does not specify nuclear threats, in part because it even predates China’s first nuclear test.
In its 2013 assurances, Beijing praised Ukraine’s 1994 agreement to give up thousands of Soviet-era nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from the United States, Britain, and Russia. “China undertakes unconditionally not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear Ukraine, and in the conditions when Ukraine suffers an invasion with nuclear weapons or is under the threat of such an invasion, to provide Ukraine with appropriate security guarantees,” the statement said. said.
Russian aircraft struck a maternity hospital in besieged Mariupol in southern Ukraine.
Photo: Yevgeny Maloletka/Associated Press
At first, some Chinese state media, including the official Xinhua news agency, raised alarm by calling Beijing’s deal with Ukraine a “nuclear umbrella,” a term Washington uses to describe its pledges to protect allies like South Korea. Some experts say the umbrella is a gross exaggeration of the scope of Beijing’s promise, and many of the original Chinese news reports have since disappeared from the internet.
“The umbrella is not accurate. If that were true, it would be a very important issue,” said Gerald S. Brown, a Washington-based military analyst who specializes in China and nuclear weapons. He said that the nuclear umbrella is an exclusively American concept.
The official language of Beijing, which opposes nuclear umbrellas, has not changed for decades and is published on the website of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs: China “did not place nuclear weapons on the territory of other countries and did not provide a nuclear umbrella to any country.”
As rocket rain hits Ukraine, one problem arises in interpreting China’s intentions: Beijing does not appear to have published an official English translation of the agreement. Some words in the agreement, including the word “bao zheng”, which is loosely translated as “guarantee”, may have slightly different meanings.
When the US offered its nuclear security commitments to Ukraine years before China did, one of the US negotiators Steven Pifer said they deliberately used the more vague word “guarantee” instead of the more forceful “guarantee.”
However, since Russia has long posed as the main security threat to Ukraine, the Chinese agreement seemed to signal Beijing’s willingness to take on Moscow in such a conflict. While China today describes a strategic partnership with Russia, the two countries have often been on opposite sides of territorial issues and competed for influence in third countries.
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A Ukrainian soldier photographs a destroyed church after Russian shelling of Mariupol, Ukraine.
Evgeny Maloletka/Associated Press
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A Ukrainian soldier photographs a destroyed church after Russian shelling of Mariupol, Ukraine.
Evgeny Maloletka/Associated Press
In the current reading of the Ukrainian agreement, it may also seem more hostile to Moscow than it originally was. Signatory Ukraine, then-President Viktor Yanukovych, enjoyed the backing of the Kremlin and abandoned its partnership with the European Union a few weeks ago, factors that spurred massive pro-Western demonstrations that forced him to step down from power within two months of his visit to Beijing.
More than two weeks of Russian bombing have reduced Ukraine’s second-largest city to rubble. Yaroslav Trofimov of the WSJ reports from Kharkiv, where residents clear rubble during the day and hide underground at night. Photo: Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Yanukovych’s visit to Beijing comes just three months after Mr. Xi announced plans for his Belt and Road Initiative to restore the ancient Silk Road trade routes that linked China to Europe, some of which run through Ukraine. The state visit of the head of Ukraine to Beijing also coincided with the arrival there of the then Vice President Joe Biden. It was the European leader, not the American guest, who received the highest ratings on China Central Television’s mainstream news.
But Beijing signaled that its deal was with Ukraine, not Yanukovych, when China’s legislature ratified the pledge in 2015.
Intak Han, president of South Korea’s Jeju Peace Institute, a non-proliferation think tank, says China’s guarantees on paper to Ukraine exceed those it is known to have given North Korea. He wonders if Russia could have backed the pact to dissuade Kyiv from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
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Miles Yu, a senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute and adviser to former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has been trying to draw attention to the 2013 deal for years. He says it showed tensions between Beijing and Moscow, reflected Ukraine’s desire for a third alternative to Russia and the EU, and served to strengthen China’s access to weapons systems such as aircraft engines made in Ukraine.
“China has long had a strategic interest in bringing Ukraine into its geopolitical orbit,” says Mr. Yu.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin last week in Beijing.
Photo: CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS
Asked about the 2013 pact with Ukraine at a regular press conference on March 3, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin evaded the answer, citing a United Nations resolution on the security of non-nuclear states such as Ukraine. “Security guarantees have clear content limits and are triggered under certain conditions,” Mr. Wang said.
“On the Ukrainian issue, it is now an urgent task for all parties to remain calm and show restraint, de-escalate the situation and advance [a] political settlement,” he said.
— Annick Bao contributed to this article.
Write to James T. Areddy at [email protected]
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