BEIJING: China came out in support of US President Donald Trump\u2019s bid to strike a deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, at a G20 meeting in South Africa on Thursday, while US allies rallied around Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
\nLess than a month into his presidency, Trump has upended US policy on the war, scrapping a campaign to isolate Moscow with a phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin and talks between senior US and Russian officials that have sidelined Ukraine.
\nTrump on Wednesday then denounced Zelensky as a \u201cdictator,\u201d prompting statements of support for the Ukrainian president from G20 members such as Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom.
\n\u201cChina supports all efforts conducive to peace (in Ukraine), including the recent consensus reached between the United States and Russia,\u201d Wang Yi told other G20 foreign ministers gathered in Johannesburg, according to a statement from his ministry.
\n\u201cChina is willing to continue playing a constructive role in the political resolution of the crisis,\u201d he added.
\nWang did not reiterate the point he made at the Munich Security Conference last Friday that all stakeholders in the Russia-Ukraine conflict should participate in any peace talks.
\nBeijing wants to ensure its involvement in whatever deal Trump seeks to strike with the Kremlin to prevent a currently diplomatically-isolated Russia from slipping out from under its influence, and because its ties to Russia offer China an \u201cin\u201d with European officials worried about being frozen out of any talks, analysts say.
\n\u201cBy going straight to Putin, President Trump has erased what Beijing had hoped could be a key piece of initial leverage,\u201d said Ruby Osman, a China expert at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
\n\u201cInstead, China might turn its attention to discussing a Chinese role in eventual reconstruction and peacekeeping \u2014 something that would give Beijing a significantly more vested interest in European security architecture,\u201d she added.
\nThe Trump administration said on Tuesday it had agreed to hold more talks with Russia on ending the nearly three-year long conflict after a 4-1\/2-hour long meeting in Saudi Arabia.
\nRussia said the talks had been useful, but hardened its demands, notably insisting it would not tolerate the NATO alliance granting membership to Ukraine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BEIJING: China came out in support of US President Donald Trump\u2019s bid to strike a deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine, at a G20 meeting in South Africa on Thursday, while US allies rallied around Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Less than a month into his presidency, Trump has upended US policy on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77404,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77407,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77391\/revisions\/77407"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}