Li Hui, China’s special envoy to seek a negotiated solution to the Ukraine war, believes that kyiv and Moscow are not yet ready to start peace talks. “The way things are now, it can be quite difficult for all parties to sit down and negotiate fruitfully,” he said during an appearance this Friday in Beijing, after returning from a trip to Europe in which he visited Ukraine, Poland , France, Germany, the headquarters of the European institutions in Brussels and Russia. The trip does not seem to have yielded tangible results so far.
In his opinion, there are still “many difficulties” to overcome. But Li, a former ambassador to Moscow and directly appointed by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to forge a possible agreement, has assured that he sees some point “of common understanding” that should not be overlooked “no matter how slight.” “The Russian side said that it has never opposed peace talks,” while the Ukrainian side has also expressed “its desire for peace,” the diplomat added.
His conclusion, after two weeks of top-level interviews —with President Volodimir Zelenski, in Kiev, and with the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, in Moscow, among others— is that no one involved “has closed the door to talks of peace”. The “risk of escalation”, in any case, remains “high”, and he has recalled how while visiting Kiev the anti-aircraft sirens sounded every day and the Ukrainian capital suffered “two huge air attacks” from Russia. All the parties, he has stated, have also shown their concern about the repercussions of the conflict in the rest of the world, especially in what has to do with “nuclear security”.
China’s intention, he has expressed, is to assess the material collected, study possible initiatives and return if necessary by sending a new delegation to persevere in rapprochement: “The important thing now is that someone take the initiative to help build consensus and common understanding as broad as possible to create the conditions for the final resolution of the crisis step by step”. China, Li has assured, “is willing to help.”
The tour has lasted between May 15 and 28. Li has thanked the “warm” welcome he has received from all the countries he has visited, has defined the talks as “sincere” and “in depth”, and has summarized among the disasters caused by a war the very complicated train connections and planes that he must have made to travel from one capital to another. She has also labeled as “erroneous” information included in a recent article by The Wall Street Journal in which he was credited with having landed in Europe with a clear message: that European capitals demand a ceasefire from Ukraine with Russia present in the occupied territories. “It is a maneuver to sow discord between China and Ukraine,” she pointed out.
Kiev said in a statement after Li’s visit on May 18 that Ukraine would not accept any peace plan that entails a loss of its territory or a freeze on the conflict. When directly questioned if China supports Ukraine to recover the occupied areas, including Crimea, the special envoy referred to the first point of the position paper that Beijing presented in February to facilitate a negotiated exit. That first paragraph is “very clear”, he has said. “We respect the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries. I think that says a lot about our position.” As for Russia, it has not made Moscow’s red lines clear for a possible ceasefire.
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Li has assured that one of China’s main objectives is to “lower the temperature on the battlefield” and has asked to stop “adding fuel”, an allusion to NATO countries that provide military support to Ukraine. “If we want to end the war, it is important that we stop sending weapons onto the battlefield. Or the stresses alone [entrarán en] an upward spiral”, he assured, a position that Beijing has maintained for months.
Little by little, China has been placing itself in the role of negotiator. Coinciding with the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he presented a position paper -not a peace plan- to reach a “political resolution of the crisis” -not war-. While the 12-point text stressed that “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries must be respected” and that “nuclear war must not be fought and can never be won,” it also blamed NATO, and especially the United States, of being the true responsible for the conflict, for not having taken into account the “legitimate security concerns” of Moscow. That roadmap was coldly received by Washington and Brussels for not distinguishing between the aggressor (Russia) and the victim (Ukraine), after a year in which both the US and the European Union had criticized on multiple occasions the calculated equidistance that Beijing was keeping in the war in favor of Moscow.
Li has assured during the appearance that the Ukrainian side told him during his visit that “many points” of the Chinese plan “coincide with President Zelensky’s 10-point peace formula.”
The veteran diplomat has spent his entire career managing China’s relationship, first with the Soviet Union and later with the independent nations that emerged after its dissolution. Li Hui, 70, joined the Department of Soviet and Eastern European Affairs of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in 1975, coinciding with a time of deep rivalry between Beijing and Moscow, due to ideological, political and economic differences.
This senior official is well seasoned in the modus operandi of the diplomacy of the Asian giant in the last four decades. Li was first posted to the Soviet Union in 1981, where he worked for four years in various posts at the Chinese Embassy. Ten years later he was again sent to Moscow as first secretary of his country’s diplomatic headquarters, and it was in the Moscow city where he witnessed the disintegration of the USSR. From Russia he moved to Kazakhstan in 1992, where he served as ambassador from 1997 to 1999.
In 2008, he was appointed vice foreign minister by the Hu Jintao administration and, a year later, ambassador to Russia, a position he held after Xi Jinping came to power in 2013. He is from the northern province of Heilongjiang, which borders the A Eurasian nation, Li is fluent in Russian and has frequently published articles in the media of both countries, in which he has made no secret of siding with the Kremlin. That record had generated mistrust in kyiv before his visit. Since August 2019, after becoming the longest-serving Chinese ambassador in the Russian capital (a decade), Li has served as the Chinese government’s special representative for Eurasian affairs.
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