2023-04-22 23:55:34
France displayed its “dismay” on Saturday evening following remarks by the Chinese ambassador to France, who denied the sovereignty of the countries resulting from the Soviet Union and questioned the membership of Crimea in Ukraine.
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Questioned on Friday evening on the French channel LCI, Lu Shaye estimated that the countries of the former USSR “do not have effective status in international law because there is no international agreement to concretize their sovereign country status.
Regarding Crimea, a Ukrainian territory that Russia has occupied since 2014, he said: “It depends on how you perceive this problem. There is history. Crimea was at the very beginning to Russia. It was Khrushchev who gave Crimea to Ukraine in the days of the Soviet Union.”
The Chinese diplomat called for people to stop “quibbling” over the issue of post-Soviet borders. “Now the most urgent thing is to stop, to achieve the ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine, he said.
The French Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it had “learned with dismay” of these remarks, asking China “to say (if they) reflect its position, which we hope is not the case”.
Ukraine was internationally recognized “within borders including Crimea in 1991 by the entire international community, including China, upon the fall of the USSR as a new member state of the United Nations”, insisted Paris, recalling that the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 is “illegal under international law”.
If Beijing says it is officially neutral, Chinese President Xi Jinping has never condemned the Russian invasion or even spoken on the phone, so far, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Conversely, he recently went to Moscow to reaffirm his partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the guise of an anti-Western front.
During a visit to China in early April, Emmanuel Macron urged Xi Jinping to “bring Russia to its senses” vis-à-vis Ukraine and urged him not to deliver weapons to Moscow.
The two heads of state had issued a joint statement in which they pledged to “support any effort to restore peace in Ukraine”.
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