Ukraine’s former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said that Chinese support for Russia was helping it to continue the Ukraine war as he discussed the war’s trajectory at Chatham House on Tuesday 3 November.
Yatsenyuk said that while the Russian economy is in a ‘dire state’, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin still has ‘enough resources to prosecute the war.’ He said the reasons for this included higher oil prices due to the Iran war and Chinese support for Russia.
Yatsenyuk said:
‘I want to be very clear that China isn’t neutral. China actually supports this war, and China is an ally to Russia. Let’s call a spade a spade.
I do understand that it’s around 1.5 billion of people, nukes, a huge global powerhouse. But the truth is that China is actually the closest strategic partner to the Russian Federation, and China provided the way to circumvent sanctions for Russia.’
He also said: ‘There is no clear evidence that China provides weaponry to Russia, but there is no doubt that China provides dual-use materials to Russia.’
Asked which side would break first in the conflict, he said that he believed Russia would ‘back down’ eventually if various developments took place, including Ukraine receiving more financial support from the European Union. He said Ukraine was facing a ‘huge budgetary gap’ of around €70 billion for the next year, with around €40 billion of this needed for ammunition.
Asked about whether Ukraine could recover territory from Russian forces, Yatsenyuk said: ‘I want to be very realistic. Whether we can regain territory right now: Not really.’
But he said if the Ukrainian state is preserved, the war ends and various other conditions are met, including Ukraine getting ‘something similar to the Marshall Plan’, then ‘the time will come when Ukraine will regain its complete territorial independency.’
He said he disagreed with the framing of the war as ‘Putin’s war against Ukraine’: ‘This is the war of the Russian people who support Putin against an independent and sovereign nation, which is Ukraine.’
‘If Putin dies, another successor from KGB will take over the throne. That’s my calculus. And it means that we have to be strong enough to survive, strong enough to defend, strong enough to preserve our country,’ he said.
Yatsenyuk, who was Ukraine’s prime minister from 2014 to 2016, is the founder of the Open Ukraine Foundation and chairman of the Kyiv Security Forum.
Watch the full event here.