US envoy criticises Beijing for refusing to condemn Moscow

BERLIN • The new US ambassador to Germany has accused China of taking President Vladimir Putin's side in the Ukraine conflict as Beijing refuses to condemn Russia over the crisis.

"President Xi (Jinping) says he's being neutral in this conflict. There is no neutrality in this conflict," said Ms Amy Gutmann, who was confirmed as the US ambassador under President Joe Biden last month after tumultuous years with Mr Donald Trump's envoy.

"Not to denounce Mr Putin's aggression as aggression... is taking a side. China is taking Mr Putin's side in this conflict," she told journalists at the US embassy in Berlin on Monday.

Ms Gutmann, 72, is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

The United States had previously been represented in Berlin by Mr Trump's ally Richard Grenell, who raised hackles in Germany with a combative approach, including vowing to empower anti-establishment right-wingers in Europe.

Ms Gutmann was previously president of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution, and is an expert in democratic processes. She served as chair of former president Barack Obama's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

She said her Jewish father Kurt, who died when she was a teenager, "was and still is my model of courage".

"It's deeply ingrained in my consciousness and my psyche that I would not be alive today if it weren't for the fact that my father saw the handwriting on the wall."

As a college student in 1934, her father had realised his family would not be safe in the country under Adolf Hitler and fled to India. He later settled in New York, where Ms Gutmann was born.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE