The war in Ukraine is the “greatest threat to the world order”, US Ambassador Nicholas Burns said at a forum in Beijing on Monday – a rare event that saw Burns seated on a panel next to his Russian colleague for a diplomatic debate.
“The fact that Russia crossed the border with an armed force, without provocation, and started this war with so much human suffering, so many innocent civilians killed in Ukraine – this is a direct violation of the UN Charter, it is a direct violation of the that the Russian Federation signed when it became a member state,” Burns said at the discussion, which was hosted by Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University and the World Peace Forum.
Russian Ambassador to China Andrey Denisov shot back: “I totally disagree and I can object to every sentence of this intervention,” he said.
Denisov then offered a “diplomatic courtesy” to wish Burns and other Americans a happy 4th of July, before accusing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of provoking Russia’s action with “five waves of expansion”.
Denisov painted the current world order as teetering on the brink of “sabotage” by the United Nations.
Rare display of diplomatic debate: The event, which also included UK Ambassador to China Caroline Wilson and French Ambassador Laurent Bili, was a rare diplomatic debate after the Russian invasion, which Western democracies staunchly condemned.
“Russia is primarily responsible for the war,” Wilson said. “NATO is a purely defensive alliance that has acted with extraordinary restraint towards Russia.”
It was also notable that such condemnations of the war in Ukraine were being voiced in China. The Chinese Communist Party did not condemn the war or even call it an invasion. Meanwhile, China’s state media presented a carefully censored version of the war to its citizens and repeated the Kremlin’s NATO talking points.
Source: CNN Brasil
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