Chinese President Xi Jinping is “uneasy” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in part because “his own intelligence doesn’t seem to have told him what was going to happen,” CIA Director Bill Burns said. to the US Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday (10).
The Chinese leadership is also concerned about “the reputational damage that China suffers from the association with the ‘ugliness’ of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” and “the economic consequences at a time when growth rates in China are lower than in 30 years,” according to Burns.
“President Xi is probably a little uneasy as he observes the way in which President Vladimir Putin has brought Americans and Europeans closer together and strengthened the transatlantic alliance in ways that would have been a little difficult to imagine before the invasion,” the agency’s director said.
More background
US officials have closely followed China’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as fears grow that the two autocratic nations are catching up on the world stage. Just weeks before the invasion began, Putin and Xi met at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing and the two nations issued a joint statement affirming a “no-limits” partnership.
A Western intelligence report indicated that Chinese officials at the same time requested that senior Russian officials wait until the Beijing Olympics were over before initiating military action in Ukraine, according to the report. CNN — but the details of the report were open to interpretation, according to a source familiar with intelligence, and it is unclear whether Putin addressed the matter directly with Xi.
Source: CNN Brasil
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