Any hopes, that last week’s meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow would help to further a political solution to the Ukraine war, were dashed by the joint statement produced after the visit. It refused to characterise the Ukraine “issue” as a war, one that clearly was initiated by the Russian invasion of a sovereign and independent country. Instead, the statement was framed in the spirt of the argument that blames others for having provoked the conflict and that justifies Moscow’s response as an affirmation of its allegedly legitimate security concerns.

The world would have welcomed China’s role as an impartial peacemaker in the greatest international conflict of these times. The role was presaged by Beijing’s success in brokering the recent agreement to reduce hostility between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, that success was not replicated in the case of the Ukraine war. Instead, the joint statement reflected the broad sentiments contained in a document, China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis, which based a solution on the need to respect the sovereignty of all countries, abandon a Cold War mentality, cease hostilities, resume peace talks, and so on.