No postponement of the invasion
China denies war request to Russia
03/03/2022, 1:50 p.m
A report by the “New York Times” caused a stir: China is said to have asked Russia not to invade Ukraine before the end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. China has now denied these allegations and senses a diversionary maneuver.
China says it has not asked Russia to postpone its invasion of Ukraine until after the Beijing Winter Olympics. State Department spokesman Wang Wenbin called a New York Times report “fake news” to the press. Such a method of diverting attention and assigning blame is despicable. The spokesman repeated accusations that NATO expansion was the cause of the conflict. “Those who create the problem should also be the ones who solve it.”
The “New York Times” referred to a “Western intelligence report” in its article. After that, a senior Chinese official told a Russian counterpart in early February not to invade Ukraine before the end of the Winter Games, according to a senior US government official and a European official. In fact, Russia only invaded Ukraine after the closing ceremony.
It is not the first time that Putin has used the time during the Olympic Games to prepare for war. As early as 2008, Russia invaded Georgia during the world’s largest sporting event, and in 2014, shortly after the end of the games in its own country (Sochi), it annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. During the Olympic Games there is the Rule of Olympic Truce which states that a truce shall be observed during the sporting event. The Olympic Truce is part of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which was adopted in 2000.
At the opening of the games, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with China’s head of state and party leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on February 4th. Both presidents reaffirmed their “strategic partnership”, demonstrated their solidarity against their great rival, the USA, and condemned NATO’s eastward expansion. According to the New York Times, the intelligence report did not necessarily indicate that there was an exchange between Putin and Xi Jinping about the invasion. The newspaper had previously quoted US sources as saying that Beijing had been warned several times by the Americans that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. But the Chinese side dismissed the possibility.