China is ready to restrain Russia to reach new geopolitical agreement with West - international expert

Oleksandr Kraiev, an expert at the Ukrainian Prism Foreign Policy Council, expressed this opinion on the Espreso TV channel.

"China is ready to play a certain stabilising role. China is clearly ready to restrain Russia from escalating the situation. As we have seen from some reports, China has already restrained Russia from using tactical nuclear weapons once. This was possible in 2022. So now China wants something in return. China wants certain guarantees of stability, it wants to continue to earn money and continue to have influence on the global East. But at the same time, the West will not make any new claims. It seems that controlling Russia, containing Russia is what China is willing to do to reach a new geopolitical agreement with the 'global West'," he said.

There are a lot of parallel tracks that Xi Jinping needs to pursue in his diplomacy right now, the international expert said.

"This is what we saw during our conversations with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. During Xi Jinping's visit to France, the most important issue in his conversation with President Emmanuel Macron will be the economy. After all, China continues to insist that it is an honest "broker", allegedly neutral, it needs to trade with the West, and Russia is not that interesting to China, so it will not help it. At the same time, these so-called four points of China's 'peace plan', which they did present during the meeting with Scholz, and which are obviously now becoming the cornerstone of the entire Chinese geostrategy, in the context of Ukraine and Russia," Kraiev added.

• On April 29, the Chinese Foreign Ministry confirmed Xi Jinping's visits to three European countries in May.