Russian and US diplomats go head-to-head at rare forum in Beijing
Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, in an image from 2021. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Russia’s war in Ukraine is the “greatest threat to the world order,” US Ambassador Nicholas Burns told a forum in Beijing on Monday, a rare event that saw Burns sitting on a panel next to his Russian counterpart for a diplomatic debate.
“The fact that Russia has crossed the border with an armed force, unprovoked, and has started this war with so much human suffering, with so many innocent civilians killed in Ukraine, is a direct violation of the Charter of the United Nations, it is a direct violation of what the Russian Federation signed up to when it became a member state,” Burns said during the debate, organized by the prestigious Beijing Tsinghua University and the World Peace Forum.
Russian ambassador to China Andrey Denisov fired back: “I totally disagree and can oppose each and every sentence of that speech,” he said.
Denisov then paused out of “diplomatic courtesy” to wish Burns and the other Americans present a happy 4th of July, before going on to accuse NATO of provoking Russia into action with “five waves of expansion” and painting the order. to the brink of the abyss due to the “sabotage” of the United Nations.
The event, which was also attended by the UK’s ambassador to China, Caroline Wilson, and the French ambassador, Laurent Bili, was a rare display of diplomatic debate in the wake of that Russian invasion, which Western democracies have strongly condemned.
“The primary responsibility for the war rests with Russia,” Wilson said in his remarks. “NATO is a purely defensive alliance. NATO has exercised extraordinary restraint towards Russia,” he said.
The forum was also notable as a place for such condemnations of Russia’s war to be voiced within China, where the Communist Party has refused to condemn the invasion or name it as such, while its state media has presented a version carefully censored the war from its citizens and parroted the Kremlin’s talking points regarding NATO.
