More than 30 countries want to talk to Ukrainian representatives in Saudi Arabia over the weekend about a path to peace. The federal government hopes that the West and the Global South will close ranks – and thanks to Saudi Arabia, also for China.
Diplomacy is a business that gets dirty quickly. It is therefore not surprising that Germany also maintains close relations with selected dictatorships for higher reasons. The new role that Saudi Arabia and its crown prince Mohammed bin Salman have in the wake of the Russian attack on Ukraine is equivalent to a special upgrade. After all, Saudi Arabia is a war party in Yemen, has ties to Islamist networks, is second in this ranking behind Iran with 196 executions in 2022, and bin Salman is believed to have commissioned the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. Now, however, a conference on the war in Ukraine is taking place in the Saudi port of Jeddah at the weekend, from which the German government has high hopes.
The foreign policy advisor to Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Jens Plötner, will represent Berlin. More than 30 other countries, including the USA, EU countries, Great Britain, Chile, Indonesia, Egypt and Turkey, are participating at the level of national security advisers. Of course, Ukraine is also there, but not Russia, and the exciting question is: Will a representative of the superpower China, which remains close friends with Russia, come? According to Western assessments, the chances of that happening are good. At a meeting at the end of June, China canceled due to scheduling difficulties. It would be “a fruit of the Saudi effort,” according to Berlin government circles, if things were different this time.
Riyadh’s new proximity to Beijing
In any case, China would not have appeared at a conference organized by Western states in a NATO country to the exclusion of Russia. Beijing holds the key to a reasonably just end to the war in Ukraine. Ruler Xi Jinping is perhaps the only head of state who can influence President Vladimir Putin at all, especially since the close Russian-Chinese economic ties have become vital for Russia in the face of Western sanctions.
This is where Saudi Arabia comes in. The kingdom has been approaching China for months. Beijing is currently brokering a rapprochement between the Sunni Gulf state and the mostly Shiite mullahs’ state of Iran, who are deeply hostile. In addition, Saudi Arabia, as a middle power independent of the West, is capable of hosting the conference with satisfaction from governments that are less critical of Russia than the West and its traditional allies. In addition, the country is geographically well located. The participating state representatives in their air-conditioned conference rooms and hotels will hardly notice the more than 40 degrees outside temperature, from which many Saudis flee to the European summer resort.
A common understanding of just peace
With Brazil, India and South Africa, the list of binding commitments includes other important representatives of the so-called Global South, i.e. those developing and emerging countries that are always in demand in the concert of the great powers when both sides try to shift the balance to their own advantage in a stalemate . But unlike during the Cold War, these states are much more self-confident today, aware of their strategic importance. Together with Russia and China, Brazil, India and South Africa form the bloc of the so-called BRICS countries, all five want to meet in Johannesburg on August 22nd. However, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is traveling for Russia because South Africa would have to arrest Putin, who was wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, immediately after his landing.
Now it will be Lavrov who hears from the four important partner countries what was discussed in Jeddah. For months, the federal government, together with other western states, has been wooing Brazil, South Africa and India, which for various reasons shied away from taking sides in the conflict, but have recently cautiously approached western views of the war. According to German government circles, the conference is about building a “bridge” between Western ideas of a peace solution and the ideas and interests of the global South.
In the best case, all participants could find themselves in a declaration that lays down the principles of a just peace solution. The basis could therefore be provided by the 10-point peace plan presented by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj in November, the peace plan of a group of African states and Brazil’s proposals.
change of perspective
The African representatives – like China with its peace initiative that has gone nowhere – have been pushing for a quick ceasefire for a long time. Kiev, together with its supporter states, consistently rejected this, because it would only have given Russia the opportunity to consolidate occupied territory and to regroup its own troops. The African representatives are said to have backed away from this demand after their visit to Ukraine, after they had visited war atrocity sites such as Bucha and had heard with their own ears descriptions of the children kidnapped by Russia.
Meanwhile, the West hopes that Putin’s cancellation of the grain deal and the bombing of Ukrainian grain silos and ports will also change African governments’ minds. After all, they want more reliable trade routes and food security, not handouts and favors like the ones Russia recently promised with free grain deliveries. It will be interesting to see whether all participants at the summit agree with Zelenskyy’s call for the complete restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It will be the goal of Western states and Kiev to rally as many central and regional powers still standing between the chairs behind this maxim.
The conference came at a time of initial disillusionment, because the Ukrainian army’s counter-offensive, which was linked with great hopes at least by the Western public, is only making slow progress. What this means for the further course of the war is just as difficult to predict as the implications for possible peace negotiations. According to government circles, Ukraine is at least actively working on papers and proposals on how a peace agreement could be reached, and is intensively seeking to close ranks with the countries of the Global South. It is unclear whether a possible reorientation of countries such as India, Brazil and South Africa could also make an impression on Beijing. At least it seems worth trying.