The ambassador of the People’s Republic of China in Paris, Lu Shaye, has unleashed a diplomatic storm and angered the governments of the European Union with some statements to the LCI channel, last Friday, in which he questioned the sovereignty of the states that emerged after of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
In Beijing they have been forced this Monday to rectify their representative in France when verifying the virulent European reaction. “China respects the status of the former Soviet republics as sovereign countries after the dissolution of the USSR,” said the spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, who stressed that, after its independence, Beijing immediately established diplomatic relations with them. Ning also highlighted China’s respect for the United Nations Charter.
Despite the official correction, Shaye’s statements have created a lot of concern because they reveal a fundamental attitude of Beijing that is highly aligned with Moscow’s position on Ukraine, which would make it impossible for it to mediate to end the war, and because of the implications for the Taiwan issue.
Shaye, a hard-line ambassador known for his forceful opinions in the past, has been summoned this Monday at the Quai d’Orsay, the headquarters of the French Foreign Ministry, to give explanations. The same has happened with the Chinese ambassadors in the three Baltic republics – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. alarmed by the fact that their right to independence is being questioned, 32 years after reconquering it.
The EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, described Shaye’s comments as “unacceptable” on Sunday. Several heads of diplomacy from European countries meeting in Luxembourg expressed themselves this Monday in similar terms.
During an interview on LCI, a continuous information channel devoted entirely to news and analysis about the Ukrainian war, Shaye said that “the countries of the Soviet Union do not have effective status in international law because there is no international agreement to establish its status as a sovereign country”.
In the same interview, Shaye recalled that the Crimean peninsula was Russian until Khrushchev handed it over to Ukraine, albeit within the framework of the USSR, in 1954. The diplomat did not mention, however, the long history of Crimea, disputed by various powers for centuries. Faced with the perplexity of his interviewer, Shaye wanted to close the debate and insisted that the important thing was to achieve a ceasefire in the war.
