>The intelligence that US officials gave the Chinese was then passed along to the Kremlin to give Putin an advance warning.
>Social Credit System
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/us/politics/us-china-russia-ukraine.html
U.S. Officials Repeatedly Urged China to Help Avert War in Ukraine
Americans presented Chinese officials with intelligence on Russia’s troop buildup in hopes that President Xi Jinping would step in, but were repeatedly rebuffed.
WASHINGTON — Over three months, senior Biden administration officials held half a dozen urgent meetings with top Chinese officials in which the Americans presented intelligence showing Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine and beseeched the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade, according to U.S. officials.
Each time, the Chinese officials, including the foreign minister and the ambassador to the United States, rebuffed the Americans, saying they did not think an invasion was in the works. After one diplomatic exchange in December, U.S. officials got intelligence showing Beijing had shared the information with Moscow, telling the Russians that the United States was trying to sow discord — and that China would not try to impede Russian plans and actions, the officials said.
The previously unreported talks between American and Chinese officials show how the Biden administration tried to use intelligence findings and diplomacy to persuade a superpower it views as a growing adversary to stop the invasion of Ukraine, and how that nation, led by President Xi Jinping, persistently sided with Russia even as the evidence of Moscow’s plans for a military offensive grew over the winter.
This account is based on interviews with senior administration officials with knowledge of the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the diplomacy. The Chinese Embassy spokesman, Liu Pengyu, answered an earlier request for comment a half-day after this article was posted online, saying, “For some time, China has actively promoted the political settlement process of the Ukraine issue.”
China is Russia’s most powerful partner, and the two nations have been strengthening their bond for many years across diplomatic, economic and military realms. Mr. Xi and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, two autocrats with some shared ideas about global power, had met 37 times as national leaders before this year. If any world leader could make Mr. Putin think twice about invading Ukraine, it was Mr. Xi, went the thinking of some U.S. officials.
But the diplomatic efforts failed, and Mr. Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning after recognizing two Russia-backed insurgent enclaves in the country’s east as independent states.
In a call on Friday, Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi that the United States and NATO had ignored Russia’s “reasonable” security concerns and had reneged on their commitments, according to a readout of the call released by the Chinese state news media. Mr. Xi reiterated China’s public position that it was important to respect the “legitimate security concerns” as well as the “sovereignty and territorial integrity” of all countries. Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi that Russia was willing to negotiate with Ukraine, and Mr. Xi said China supported any such move.
Some American officials say the ties between China and Russia appear stronger than at any time since the Cold War. The two now present themselves as an ideological front against the United States and its European and Asian allies, even as Mr. Putin carries out the invasion of Ukraine, whose sovereignty China has recognized for decades.
The growing alarm among American and European officials at the alignment between China and Russia has reached a new peak with the Ukraine crisis, exactly 50 years to the week after President Richard M. Nixon made a historic trip to China to restart diplomatic relations to make common cause in counterbalancing the Soviet Union. For 40 years after that, the relationship between the United States and China grew stronger, especially as lucrative trade ties developed, but then frayed due to mutual suspicions, intensifying strategic competition and antithetical ideas about power and governance.
In the recent private talks on Ukraine, American officials heard language from their Chinese counterparts that was consistent with harder lines the Chinese had been voicing in public, which showed that a more hostile attitude had become entrenched, according to the American accounts.
On Wednesday, after Mr. Putin ordered troops into eastern Ukraine but before its full invasion, Hua Chunying, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a news conference in Beijing that the United States was “the culprit of current tensions surrounding Ukraine.”
“On the Ukraine issue, lately the U.S. has been sending weapons to Ukraine, heightening tensions, creating panic and even hyping up the possibility of warfare,” she said. “If someone keeps pouring oil on the flame while accusing others of not doing their best to put out the fire, such kind of behavior is clearly irresponsible and immoral.”
She added: “When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?” She has refused to call Ms. Hua’s fiery anti-American remarks as Russia was moving to attack its neighbor stunned some current and former U.S. officials and China analysts in the United States. But the verbal grenades echo major points in the 5,000-word joint statement that China and Russia issued on Feb. 4 when Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin met at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. In that document, the two countries declared their partnership had “no limits” and that they intended to stand together against American-led democratic nations. China also explicitly sided with Russia in the text to denounce enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Last Saturday, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, criticized NATO in a video talk at the Munich Security Conference. European leaders in turn accused China of working with Russia to overturn what they and the Americans say is a “rules-based international order.” Mr. Wang did say that Ukraine’s sovereignty should be “respected and safeguarded” — a reference to a foreign policy principle that Beijing often cites — but no Chinese officials have mentioned Ukraine in those terms since Russia’s full invasion began.
“They claim neutrality, they claim they stand on principle, but everything they say about the causes is anti-U.S., blaming NATO and adopting the Russian line,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown University professor who was senior Asia director at the White House National Security Council in the Obama administration. “The question is: How sustainable is that as a posture? How much damage does it do to their ties with the U.S. and their ties with Europe?”
The Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach to China to try to avert war began after President Biden and Mr. Xi held a video summit on Nov. 15. In the talk, the two leaders acknowledged challenges in the relationship between their nations, which is at its lowest point in decades, but agreed to try to cooperate on issues of common interest, including health security, climate change and nuclear weapons proliferation, White House officials said at the time.
hat is at the root of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine within its natural sphere of influence it has grown unnerved at Ukraine’s closeness with the West and the prospect that the country might join NATO or the European Union. While Ukraine is part of neither, it receives financial and military aid from the United States and Europe.
Are these tensions just starting now? Antagonism between the two nations has been simmering since 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, after an uprising in Ukraine replaced their Russia-friendly president with a pro-Western government. Then, Russia annexed Crimea and inspired a separatist movement in the east. A cease-fire was negotiated in 2015, but fighting has continued.
How did this invasion unfold? After amassing a military presence near the Ukrainian border for months, on Feb. 21, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signed decrees recognizing two pro-Russian breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine. On Feb. 23, he declared the start of a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Several attacks on cities around the country have since unfolded.
What has Mr. Putin said about the attacks? Mr. Putin said he was acting after receiving a plea for assistance from the leaders of the Russian-backed separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, citing the false accusation that Ukrainian forces had been carrying out ethnic cleansing there and arguing that the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction.
How has Ukraine responded? On Feb. 23, Ukraine declared a 30-day state of emergency as cyberattacks knocked out government institutions. Following the beginning of the attacks, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, declared martial law. The foreign minister called the attacks “a full-scale invasion” and called on the world to “stop Putin.”
How has the rest of the world reacted? The United States, the European Union and others have condemned Russia’s aggression and begun issuing economic sanctions against Russia. Germany announced on Feb. 23 that it would halt certification of a gas pipeline linking it with Russia. China refused to call the attack an “invasion,” but did call for dialogue.
How could this affect the economy? Russia controls vast global resources — natural gas, oil, wheat, palladium and nickel in particular — so the conflict could have far-reaching consequences, prompting spikes in energy and food prices and spooking investors. Global banks are also bracing for the effects of sanctions.
After the meeting, American officials decided that the Russian troop buildup around Ukraine presented the most immediate problem that China and the United States could try to defuse together. Some officials thought the outcome of the video summit indicated there was potential for an improvement in U.S.-China relations. Others were more skeptical, but thought it was important to leave no stone unturned in efforts to prevent Russia from attacking, one official said.
Days later, White House officials met with the ambassador, Qin Gang, at the Chinese Embassy. They told the ambassador what U.S. intelligence agencies had detected: a gradual encirclement of Ukraine by Russian forces, including armored units. William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, had flown to Moscow on Nov. 2 to confront the Russians with the same information, and on Nov. 17, American intelligence officials shared their findings with NATO.
At the Chinese Embassy, Russia’s aggression was the first topic in a discussion that ran more than one and a half hours. In addition to laying out the intelligence, the White House officials told the ambassador that the United States would impose tough sanctions on Russian companies, officials and businesspeople in the event of an invasion, going far beyond those announced by the Obama administration after Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
The U.S. officials said the sanctions would also hurt China over time because of its commercial ties.
They also pointed out they knew how China had helped Russia evade some of the 2014 sanctions, and warned Beijing against any such future aid. And they argued that because China was widely seen as a partner of Russia, its global image could suffer if Mr. Putin invaded.
The message was clear: It would be in China’s interests to persuade Mr. Putin to stand down. But their entreaties went nowhere. Mr. Qin was skeptical and suspicious, an American official said.
American officials spoke with the ambassador about Russia at least three more times, both in the embassy and on the phone. Wendy R. Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, had a call with him. Mr. Qin continued to express skepticism and said Russia had legitimate security concerns in Europe.
The Americans also went higher on the diplomatic ladder: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke to Mr. Wang about the problem in late January and again on Monday, the same day Mr. Putin ordered the new troops into Russia-backed enclaves of Ukraine.
“The secretary underscored the need to preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said a State Department summary of the call that used the phrase that Chinese diplomats like to employ in signaling to other nations not to get involved in matters involving Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, all considered separatist problems by Beijing.
American officials met with Mr. Qin in Washington again on Wednesday and heard the same rebuttals. Hours later, Mr. Putin declared war on Ukraine on television, and his military began pummeling the country with ballistic missiles as tanks rolled across the border.
“We’ve got to put our protection on here,” said Joe Federman, Associated Press chief of bureau for Israel and the Palestinian territories.
>Mildred, you take a whole lot of time to say a whole lot of nothin'
>France maritime border police in the Mediterranean sea have announced, that they have seized a Russian trading vessel
nice face
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1497232411108814850
We need a strong democracy in the US to win the global fight against autocracy.
And the hard truth is that if Republicans won’t stand up to Trump, they can’t stand up to Putin or Xi.
Read my new piece in @TheAtlantic on democracy’s state of emergency:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/republicans-ukraine-putin-xi-trump-democracy/622898/
A State of Emergency for Democracy
By attacking the rule of law, Republicans are helping Putin and Xi.
By Hillary Rodham Clinton and Dan Schwerin
About the authors: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a former U.S. senator and secretary of state, the first woman to win a major party’s nomination for president of the United States, and a lifelong advocate for women and girls. She is the author of What Happened. Dan Schwerin is a co-founder of Evergreen Strategy Group. He has served in the White House and the State Department and was the director of speechwriting for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
>Dan Schwerin is a co-founder of Evergreen Strategy Group.
https://www.evergreenstrategygroup.com/
>https://www.evergreenstrategygroup.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Eastern_Europe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Petroleum_Trail
https://web.archive.org/web/20161006104634/https://www.ostaustria.org/bridges-magazine/volume-10-june-29-2006/item/1172-galician-california-galician-hell-the-peril-and-promise-of-oil-production-in-austria-hungary
Galician California, Galician Hell: The Peril and Promise of Oil Production in Austria-Hungary
As the location of the headquarters of OPEC and the IAEA, Vienna's connection with the international energy industry and with petroleum is well known. Anyone who has flown into Vienna and driven by the massive complex of OMV refineries that separate Schwechat from the city itself knows that Austria boasts its own refining industry.
The oil production occurred almost exclusively in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, acquired by the Habsburgs during the first partition of Poland in 1772. (That same territory is split today between Poland and the Ukraine.) The crescent-shaped province marking the northeastern border of the Habsburg Empire was devoted almost exclusively to agriculture, and the land was not kind. Characterized by repeated crop failures, its agricultural yield even in the best of years was the lowest of all Austrian provinces. Overpopulation led to endemic famine, which contemporary critics and historians alike have believed to have caused an estimated 50,000 deaths from malnutrition each year. A wave of emigration that started in the 1880s carried 420,000 Galician Ukrainians and over 390,000 Galician Poles across the Atlantic Ocean by 1914, and still Galicia's population grew by 45 percent between 1869 and 1910. In 1905, only 24 percent of adult male Ruthenian peasants were literate, compared to 95 percent of the empire's Germans and Czechs. Added to growing national tension between Polish landowners and Ruthenian peasants was resentment of the local Jewish population; Galicia knew neither prosperity nor peace. While some historians of Galicia have emphasized the political freedoms that its residents enjoyed as citizens of the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in Parliament (as the "Austrian" half of Austria-Hungary was called after 1867), most insist that the benefits of civil liberties were outweighed by the miseries associated with economic backwardness. This is the image of Galicia that survives today.
Given the overwhelming preponderance of agriculture and the centrality of village life, oil derricks and refineries, storage tanks and pipelines have no place in our imagined landscape of Galicia - but they should. Galicia produced over two million tons of crude oil in 1909, accounting for 5 percent of world production, and ranking as the third-largest petroleum producer in the world (after the United States and the Russian Empire). Observers lauded the Galician petroleum industry's great potential - there seemed to be no reason why the apparently unlimited supply of petroleum could not cover domestic demand and even be exported - but it was equally evident that the actual state of the petroleum industry, like that of the province and its inhabitants, was lamentable. While contemporary references to "Galician Hell" and "Galician Sodom" complement modern accounts of malnutrition, illiteracy, and the "idiocy of rural life," the nicknames "Polish Baku," "Eastern European Pennsylvania," "Austrian El Dorado," and "Galician California," more aptly reflect the enthusiasm of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What all of these appellations share is an invitation to comparison with foreign communities similarly characterized by the excitement of sudden booms and jolting progress upon the discovery of natural riches. Oil, it was hoped, might be the salvation of Galicia, a province otherwise with little raw material from which to develop industry.