A meeting to discuss the end of the Russia-Ukraine war was organized in Saudi Arabia last weekend, which saw around 40 countries including India, the United States and China attending, apart from Ukraine, on whose initiative the meeting was organised. However, “peace talks” may be a misnomer for the meeting, given any such talks warrant the presence of the two warring sides, but in this case, Russia was not invited. So the buzz is that it was more an effort on Ukraine’s part to woo the Global South comprising India, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, South Africa and others, than about negotiating peace with Russia. The other focus of the meeting was China, with western eyes firmly fixed on every move made by Beijing on the issue. No wonder the Chinese foreign ministry’s rather anodyne statement that “China is willing to work with the international community to continue to play a constructive role in promoting a political solution to the crisis in Ukraine” would have been music to Western ears.
However, a closer look would have shown that China, in reality, undercut the importance of the meeting by sending a relatively junior envoy to Riyadh, its Special Envoy for Eurasian Affairs, Li Hui. And this when countries like the United States and India sent their respective National Security Advisers, Jake Sullivan and Ajit Doval, both very high profile officials. If this was signalling on China’s part, the message was clear that it was in Saudi Arabia as a token presence and would have no role to play in any substantive peace-making. After all, it is in China’s interest for the war to continue as that would ensure Moscow’s increasing dependency on China. Also, China may have leverage over Russia but it is not interested in any settlement at a time when it is shoring up its own “alliance of the autocrats” against the democracies and their partners.
The West has been running after the chimera of “China can influence Russia to make peace with Ukraine” for a long time. And it is only now that it is starting to wake up to the reality that—to give one instance—if Beijing wanted, it could have influenced Russia to continue with the grain deal, which would have allowed both Moscow and Kyiv to ship food grains around the world, including to China. But food shortage is a small price to pay for a totalitarian state such as China—where information about famines is suppressed regularly—when it sees that this ensures a further decline in West’s resources and weakens it. Think of the materiel situation in the United States. Reports say that the US is not producing enough munitions to sustain its own war if it has to fight one against China. Experts say that Ukraine is using up enough shells just in one month that the US produces in a year. American stockpile of ammunition is falling to critically low levels, making the Pentagon worried about the generosity of the Biden administration towards Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy is being flooded with billions of US dollars and free arms and ammunitions in the vain hope that he has it in him to defeat Vladimir Putin. A Ukrainian drone attack here and there do not a victory make. Longer the war continues, deeper the resource-depleted West falls into a recession and is hollowed out from inside. Who benefits from all this? China, which increases its leverage over the Global South and even the western nations.
Economically, China may have taken a hit because of Covid and the war, but it still controls the global supply chains for it to be able to weather the hard times. And the West is not helping matters for the rest of the world by talking of “de-risking”, and not “decoupling” from China. Essentially, the West is continuing to strengthen China’s hand. In the long run, China sees itself as the number one superpower of the world and the Russia-Ukraine war is a step towards that.
As for the Global South, it too is a collateral damage in the war, and is taking a body blow as food and fuel become a scarcity. So their support will come only if there is a genuine effort to stop the war. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said a year ago to Russian President Vladimir Putin, that this was not the age of war. It is time the two warring sides paid heed to him and sat down to negotiate peace without imposing impossible terms on each other. There must be peace, and not the politics of peace.