Claiming peace in Ukraine and denouncing Vladimir Putin’s war from the West, or in the heart of Europe, is not the same as doing it in China. And this is what Pedro Sánchez did on the first stop of his first official visit to the Asian colossus.
On the eve of his meeting with President Xi Jinping, today Friday in Beijing, the Spanish leader participated yesterday on the island of Hainan in the opening session of the Boao Forum, which is chaired by Ban Ki-Moon, the former secretary General of the UN, in the presence, in addition, of the Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of China, Li Qiang. In front of all of them, Sánchez denounced Russia’s “brutal and illegal aggression against Ukraine”.
The head of the Spanish Executive assured, in front of the representatives of about thirty states of the Asia-Pacific region that participate in this important economic forum inspired by Davos, that “the international community needs responsible and constructive political actors †in the face of the war in Ukraine, which “is causing a severe humanitarian crisis, food insecurity, inflation and growing debt distress in an increasing number of vulnerable countriesâ€.
For the Spanish Government, China is a “stabilizing power”, whose role in the face of the war in Ukraine can be fundamental in determining its evolution. For starters, it might not sell weapons to Russia. This is the message that Sánchez will convey this morning to the President of China, Xi Jinping.
The Spanish leader will be the first European leader to receive the Chinese president after his meeting with Putin in Moscow last week in which he put forward a peace plan that has been met with skepticism from Western chancelleries. The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has invited Xi to visit Kyiv.
Sánchez precedes, in his visit to Beijing, the French president, Emmanuel Macron; the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen; the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and the high representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell.
During his intervention, in English, before the plenary of this important Asian economic forum, Sánchez highlighted that in the last week he has participated in the European Council in Brussels, he has attended the Ibero-American Summit in the Dominican Republic and now begins his first official visit to China.
In total, he assured, he has met with more than forty leaders from three different continents, “and let me be clear: in each of these meetings I have felt the same longing for peace, stability and prosperity. Nobody wants an economic crisis or a war”, assured the president in his speech in Boao.
This is the message that the Spanish president, aligned with the majority of European leaders, wants to begin to sink into China, because neither the Chinese giant, nor its prosperity, benefit from this war, which causes global instability . However, today Sánchez wants to demand from Xi a more relevant involvement in the resolution of the war and not to subscribe to an equidistance between the aggressor Russia and the attacked Ukraine.
The Spanish president, like other European leaders who are due to visit the Chinese capital, may have a better dialogue with the Chinese president than the United States when it comes to addressing the war conflict in Ukraine, due to the commercial and geostrategic pole held by the two great powers of the planet.
In this morning’s meeting with President Xi, Sánchez will begin to make this European diplomatic pressure felt, also with the prospect that Spain will assume the rotating presidency of the European Union from July 1.
