I’m not saying China is a devious country who loves shelling civilians, just that it’s hard to establish their attitude given the circumstances.
Putin instead recognizing the breakaway regions as independent sets a bad precedent from China's point of view.
They're presumably happy about a member of the dictators' club sticking one in the eye of a free country, a (half-)Asian country sticking one in the eye of US hegemony, and the business opportunity to buy stuff at fire sale prices because it's sanctioned everywhere else.
They're probably less happy about how long it's taking -- the Chinese want stability and moneymaking opportunities, war and high oil prices are bad for business. They're probably also been caught flat-footed by how the US / EU seems to be unifying on this issue, they may feel forced to choose sides. China really wants to maintain a balance of power where the US isn't dominant, but they need the US and EU as trading partners more than they need Russia.
> Putin instead recognizing the breakaway regions as independent sets a bad precedent from China's point of view.
and:
> China presumably really wishes Russia had set a wargoal of annexing Donbas / Crimea / all of Ukraine to be part of Russia.
are just part of the same process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Independence_of...
> Russia recognised the Republic of Crimea's declaration of independence[8][9] and agreed to incorporate the Republic into the Russian Federation following a referendum.
Agnostic to the outcome of the conflict, they were / are probably just planning on the same approach.
You can't set that wargoal anymore without proclaiming to the world that you intend to be and are proudly taking the mantle of "warcriminal". The world decided after WWII that a nation doesn't just have the right to do this anymore. Invading a sovereign country to make it your own against its will is a warcrime. Of course just as prohibition didn't stop people from drinking, this idea on the bounds of acceptable national behavior does not dampen imperial tendencies, so if you want to invade another country you need a pretext first.
It's like that South Park episode, where Stan's Uncle and Ned go hunting for bears, and scream that it's attacking them before they shoot it, when in fact it was just sitting there peacefully.
If Russia is successful in taking Ukraine, what will follow is a propaganda campaign aimed at "proving" everything Putin said about his rationale for the invasion was true. You'll have public executions of Ukrainians "admitting" to all the crimes he says they perpetrated, and he will proclaim loudly to the world that he prevented genocide and everyone should thank him for invading Ukraine.
And guess what, his allies will buy it. You and I will all see through it, and they will too but it will help them sleep at night, because not all of them are as psychopathic as Putin. Elites still need to mingle in polite company after all. It will give them something to tell their children and teach them in school. It will be something for the grieving mothers who lost their sons in the war will have a story about how their sons died for a cause, rather than the impulses driven by an insane dictator's ego.
Anyway, that story isn't as good if you went in without a pretext. Honestly though Putin got impatient and his pretext was too thin. He didn't have a 9/11 like the US did going into Iraq, so he came up with a story about Zelensky being a Nazi, which is really hard to believe. That's why a lot of people are saying his goose is cooked as a leader, because now the body bags are going back to Russia, and there's no good reason anyone has for it.
Well, Russia's been attacking hospitals and having their forces dress in enemy uniforms or peacekeeping symbols. So they don't exactly care about not committing war crimes.
I don't really understand very well why countries do so much shady stuff, gaslighting and propaganda. To me, it's a binary choice; either (a) you're not evil, so you don't do evil things, or (b) you are evil, so you do evil things.
Whereas for a lot of countries (Russia particularly right now, but also China, and some of the shadier stuff the US has done in the past) there seems to be a lot of instances of (c) you know what's right and wrong, but you do the wrong thing anyway and try to hide it.
To me this just seems irrational, a logical fallacy of the form "I simultaneously believe both P and not P" -- You simultaneously recognize that morality is important (because you try to actively cover up or lie about your immoral actions), and you spit on it at the same time (because you do the immoral actions when you have an alternative course of not doing them).
I think what you're missing is that Putin does not give a pretext for his actions because he believes they are immoral, he does it because it muddies the discourse. Think of it this way: look at what happened when Putin said he was sending "peacekeepers" into Ukraine in order to stop a "genocide". American politicians called him "shrewd". Praise for him ping ponged around right-wing media, and it was reflected back onto RT to the Russian people, who were treated with looping reels of American media personalities heaping praises onto Putin.
If Putin is overt about his goals, he doesn't get the benefit of everyone spreading a message that he's stopping a genocide, or that he's being very clever by fooling everyone with his ruse -- even though he's not and didn't fool anyone who wasn't already fooled by him before. It benefits Putin that the world is calling him clever and shrewd, even though they're simultaneously calling him a murderous tyrant. His hope is that back home, he will repel the tyrant talk as much as possible and allow Russians to only hear that he's a master technician who stopped a genocide.
NATO was obviously upsetting the world order by expanding eastward, and for obvious historical reasons, the Chinese are not a fan of NATO, and doubly dislike a NATO that is changing the status quo. So, they would have very much preferred if everybody had settled the matter in negotiation, with or without the Ukranian's interests being taken into account. However, they are going to be increasingly unhappy the more bloody, divisive, and destabilizing the war becomes.
PS: China also doesn't want instability in the west, for the record. Instability causes people like Trump, trade wars, and (god forbid) real wars, which at this point China could only lose. That's in contrast to Russia, which as a declining economy, would be well served by a chaotic situation.
PPS: Obviously, China doesn't want unity in the west either. But nobody wants unity in any bloc they are not part of, as the UK is finding out with the EU. That's not unusual at all.
I heard some people repeat this, but I don't follow the logic. Unless you are a major exporter of weapon system like the USA, war means draining resources. Yes you can increase local production of weapons for the local market, but in the case of Russia it's a direction downward, not upward. I read Russian press regularly and one of their major problems now is a sudden and drastic increase in mortgages. How will increased production of tanks help? Russians needs houses to live not more tanks - nobody sane is going to attack a country with so many nukes.
So maybe Russia is not so much served by the chaos of war as much as it needs to maintain a strangle hold over the gas and oil trade to Western Europe. Annexing the Crimea and the Donbas region gives it control over most of Ukraine's fossil fuel resources.
I think the question is a bit more deeper, though. Economic growth is fundamentally useful as a means to accrue legitimacy in the eyes of the ruled - that's how the CCP remains in power in China. That's how countries like the UK or USA have managed to avoid serious pressure to reform, despite obvious (and often comical) systemic flaws in their constitutions.
It is, however, not the only way to accrue legitimacy. Ayatollah Khomeini once opined "economics is for donkeys", and for his administration, it was entirely true: their legitimacy was based on religious grounds.
If you're entering into an era when the fundamentals of your economy are a declining asset (being a petro-state when everybody is switching to renewables), you are diplomatically isolated, your industries are uncompetitive, it makes sense to look for other sources of legitimacy. Putin's attempt to push 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality', is kinda classic.
[0] "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel"
Insane, and tragic. I blame Stalin. He created a state where the only people who could stomach being an apparatchik had no moral center, where real power always flowed through backchannels, and where limits on official power were always provisional and informal. Putin is just the cynical dregs of this system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_t...
- cheap natural resources in far bigger quantity than before
- more financial power to frame and drive the development of Russian economy
- probably access to hi-tech military gears they do not have had before
Probably enough to overpower USA in few years. UK and USA (mind the order) IMVHO have really miscalculated the long term effect of NATO expansion to the east or they already have an agreement with Russia and/or China, something like: with the excuse of the Ukrainian war we avoid a real new world war, and all parties have excuses to tighten the grip on their citizens, justify the hyper-stagflation, justify any social tissue disruption and dictatorial measure etc etc.
In just few days almost all protest about covid "conduct" of western government disappear, in Italy the emergency power that can't be legally renowned after two years are renowned "because of the war" until December 12, in France renewed talk about the "need" to postpone elections came out before the excuse was covid risk, "perhaps we will do e-voting", now the war, I imaging something "small scale" similar happen in almost all countries.
Honestly what I see is just a BIG win from the world power all, together even those formally against each other, and a BIG loss for the people, again for every people, regardless of their country.
This is a disaster for the PRC too. It's seeming increasingly possible that Putin's government may not even survive and the consolation prize of getting a nuclear power as a Chinese sattelite state may even evaporate.
The scale of Russia's actions and the scale of the world's reaction have shocked China. Both Xi and Putin have been escolating conflicts for domestic political advantage. Both may have overplayed their hand and be killed by their own security forces.
Xi wants the blessing of the 20th CCP congress (ccp 100 year anniversary) for unlimited power but the Jiang Zemin Faction is fighting him tooth and nail. Xi is not popular within the Party and there even talk of him destroying the CCP.
Both Putin and Xi are using very high risk stratergies and it look like Putin is losing. Will Xi lose as well?
They publicly support it: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/27/business/china-russia-ukr...
> As the world overwhelmingly condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese internet, for the most part, is pro-Russia, pro-war and pro-Putin.
The Chinese internet doesn't get any way without the consent (and perhaps encouragement) from the authorities. What they don't censor is sometimes as important as what they do censor.