OPINION:
Russian President Vladimir Putin just doubled down, in defiance to NATO and the United States, and deployed troops and recognized Russia-backed separatists in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, regions within Ukraine. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said Russia’s recognition of the two territories in Ukraine “is a blatant violation of international law, the territorial integrity of Ukraine and the Minsk agreements that attempted to halt the conflict with Russian-backed separatists who seized territory in Ukraine after Russia’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.”
We’ll soon find out if this is the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
China’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, at the 58th Munich Security Conference last week, said the “sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of any country should be respected and safeguarded — and Ukraine is no exception.” It’s obvious that Mr. Putin is not listening to China or concerned with the impact of his actions on China’s relations with countries in Eastern and Western Europe and Central Asia.
The fact is that China has aligned itself with a revanchist Russia that annexed Crimea in 2014, in violation of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 signed by Russia (and by the United States and the United Kingdom) promising to respect the sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine, in return for Ukraine dismantling its sizable arsenal of nuclear weapons — the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world with an estimated 1,900 strategic warheads — and acceding to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state.
In 2009, Russia and the United States confirmed that the security assurances made in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum would still be valid after the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expired in 2009. Obviously, Russia disregarded these security assurances to Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, even though by 1996, Ukraine had returned all its nuclear warheads to Russia. The reported strong sentiment in Ukraine was that dismantling its nuclear arsenal was a mistake, according to comments to the press from Pavlo Rizanenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament: “If you have nuclear weapons, people don’t invade you.”
There’s a Chinese proverb that “he who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount” — “Ch’i ’hu nan hsia pei.” It appears that Russian President Vladimir Putin is riding a tiger and may persist with an invasion of Ukraine and a threat to those additional 13 republics that compromised the former Soviet Union: Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, and in 2014 annexed Crimea. After destabilizing Eastern Ukraine for years, Mr. Putin has now recognized Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics. And Russia’s recent military intervention in Kazakhstan, on the pretext of stabilizing the domestic situation, to seize areas in northern Kazakhstan appears to be part of Mr. Putin’s irredentist playbook.
This should not be surprising to China. In the summer of 1969, the Soviet Union had 42 divisions — over 1 million troops — on its border with China, indicating that Moscow was considering a nuclear strike against Chinese nuclear facilities. That March, Chinese and Soviet forces clashed on Zhenbao Island on the Ussuri river, with both sides taking casualties. The conflict ended in two weeks, averting an escalation of hostilities with the potential use of nuclear weapons.
When China normalized relations with the United States in 1979, the Soviet Union was on the march in Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Yemen, Libya, Czechoslovakia, Nicaragua and Grenada, and then in December 1979, it invaded Afghanistan, where it eventually was decisively defeated, having to withdraw all its combat troops in 1989. During the next two years, Ukraine and Belarus declared independence, and the Baltic states sought international recognition as sovereign states. On Dec. 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin became president of a Russian state that was no longer the communist monolith.
Mr. Putin reportedly said: “The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.” It appears that Russia again is on the march with its actions in Ukraine, after severing part of Georgia, supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with the brutal suppression of the Jasmine Revolution while securing a naval base in Syria, annexing Crimea and dispatching troops to Africa and Libya and recently sending troops to Kazakhstan to literally control the country.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, recreating the Silk Road economic “belt” to revitalize ancient overland trading routes connecting Europe and Asia — built with Chinese finances and expertise — focuses on Central Asia as the most vital region for this initiative. In fact, it was in Kazakhstan in 2013 that a visiting Xi Jinping announced the establishment of the BRI. By 2014, the Central Asia-China gas pipeline through Kazakhstan accounted for 44% of China’s overall gas imports. And in October 2017, Kazakhstan started shipping its own gas to China, bypassing Russian lines. In short, China is doing considerable business in Kazakhstan and throughout Central Asia. Thus, Mr. Putin’s designs on Central Asia, as we saw with his military incursion into Kazakhstan, should concern China.
Indeed, Ukraine is part of BRI, and Mr. Putin’s efforts to dismember Ukraine should also concern China. Equally of concern must be member states of the European Union who have condemned and sanctioned Russia’s actions in Ukraine and wonder why China, with whom they have diplomatic and trade relations, has aligned itself with a revanchist Russia set on using military force against sovereign states to regain some of its past empire.
The 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, scheduled to convene in the autumn of 2022, will be “a major event in the political life of the party and the country,” according to Mr. Xi. In addition to seeking a third five-year term as the party’s general secretary and president, Mr. Xi hopefully will explain to the party and 1.4 billion people why it is in China’s interest to be aligned with a revanchist Russia. If it is an alignment simply to oppose the U.S., it is a grave mistake.
• Joseph R. DeTrani was the former director of the National Counterproliferation Center and special envoy for negotiations with North Korea. The views are the author’s and not any government agency or department.
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