Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: After wooing France, a revanchist China, like Russia, is trying to turn the clock back.
And to buttress its claims as ‘righteous’ on Taiwan, it has given a new twist to the Ukraine saga: Beijing
has claimed that the former Soviet Union’s breakaway republics, including Ukraine, have “no actual status in international law.”
And this Chinese claim has come from France whose President Emmanuel Macron had recently tried to become befriend President Xi Jinping in an attempt to restructure global geopolitics currently dominated by the US-led West.
If this fresh claim gains currency, the status of Formosa (Taiwan) or the “Republic of China”, the island that broke away from mainland China in 1949, would become even more untenable as, unlike the 14 breakaway former Soviet republics, it does not have official recognition from most countries—including the USA. In fact, China replaced Taiwan as the Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).
The latest remark made on Friday last week by the Chinese Ambassador to Paris, Lu Shaye, has drawn Kyiv’s ire after he claimed that Crimea (which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014) was “historically a part of Russia” and was offered to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
France, Ukraine, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania expressed dismay after Lu Shaye questioned the sovereignty of former Soviet countries like Ukraine.
From 1956 until its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union consisted of 15 Soviet Socialist Republics, led by Russia.
The three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – were the first to break away from the USSR between March and May 1990 by proclaiming the restoration of their independence and continuity from the original states that existed prior to their annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940. In 1991, the five Central Asian countries—Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan—also broke away. In Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus dissociated, while in Southern Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia became independent.
That left the Russian Federation alone as the former flagbearer of the Soviet Union or USSR. President Vladimir Putin is trying to recreate the Soviet Union or even its predecessor, the Tsarist Russia of the pre-1917 vintage. Ukraine is its first major target.
“These ex-USSR countries don’t have actual status in international law because there is no international agreement to materialize their sovereign status,” Shaye told a French TV network.
Caught unawares by its ‘new friend’ China, France hastily responded on Sunday by stating its “full solidarity” with all the allied countries affected, which it said had acquired their independence from Russia “after decades of oppression.”
“On Ukraine specifically, it was internationally recognized within borders including Crimea in 1991, by the entire international community, including China,” a French Foreign Ministry spokesperson said, adding China will have to clarify whether these comments reflect its position or not.
Ukraine and the three Baltic states, all formerly part of the Soviet Union, reacted along the same lines as France.
“It is strange to hear an absurd version of the ‘history of Crimea’ from a representative of a country that is so scrupulous about its thousand-year history,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior Ukrainian presidential aide, tweeted.
“If you want to be a major political player, do not parrot the propaganda of Russian outsiders,” Podolyak added.