On the night of May 23-24, Kyiv lived through total terror. Russia launched 600 drones and 90 missiles against the Ukrainian capital in a single overnight assault, resulting in numerous casualties. Impacts and damage were recorded at dozens of locations, including residential buildings, schools, markets, water infrastructure, business centers, and government buildings. For Ukrainians, this war is the daily experience of a country whose sovereignty is being tested in destroyed lives and homes.
Only days earlier, in Beijing, leaders Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin signed a long declaration on further strengthening China-Russia strategic coordination and deepening “good-neighborly and friendly cooperation.” On paper, it is a dense diplomatic document: five sections, dozens of themes, and the familiar vocabulary of sovereignty, peace, international law, multipolarity, non-interference, development, and global governance. Read from Kyiv after another night of Russian attacks, the document reads like a war-era manifesto.
Its meaning cannot be understood by isolating the short paragraph on Ukraine. The entire document presents itself as a road map for relations between “good friends and neighbors,” while in reality it is shaped by the war: by Russia’s need to survive politically and economically under pressure, and by China’s ambition to use the crisis to advance a broader post-Western vision of international order. The paragraph on Ukraine is only the keyhole through which the entire declaration should be read.
China and Russia repeatedly present themselves as guardians of sovereign equality, territorial integrity, non-interference, and the United Nations-centered international system. These principles appear throughout the declaration as both moral claims and legal vocabulary. Yet when the document finally turns to Ukraine, the same principles become strangely abstract. There is no direct recognition that Ukraine’s borders have been violated. There is no demand for the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. There is no mention of “invasion” or even “aggression,” and no naming of Russia as the party that crossed an internationally recognized border.
This raises a difficult question: if sovereign equality cannot be applied to Ukraine, what kind of sovereign equality is actually being defended?
The phrase “Ukraine crisis” performs much of this work. It has been China’s preferred diplomatic formula from the beginning, and in this declaration it aligns comfortably with Moscow’s narrative. A crisis can be tragic, complicated, and multi-causal. A crisis has no obvious aggressor. A crisis invites management. A war of aggression, by contrast, demands responsibility. By choosing the term “Ukraine crisis,” the declaration transforms Russia’s war against Ukraine into a geopolitical condition that can be managed for years to come. Once again, it removes agency from Moscow and embeds the war in a broader narrative about European security, Western pressure, NATO, sanctions, food and supply chain disruptions, and alleged external destabilization.
The repeated language of the conflict’s “root causes” echoes Russian propaganda and deepens this distortion. At first glance, the phrase sounds reasonable in the language of conflict resolution theory. Every war has causes; every peace process must address the conditions that made violence possible. In the China-Russia vocabulary, however, “root causes” usually means something very different. It reflects Russia’s deeper denial of Ukrainians as a nation and Ukraine as a fully independent state. China has not formally recognized Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territories – at least so far – but the declaration’s language still shifts the discussion away from Russia’s responsibility and toward Russia’s grievances.
The declaration’s vocabulary therefore matters. The problem, however, goes beyond vocabulary. The entire document normalizes Russia as a great power partner at a time when Moscow is waging the largest war in Europe since 1945. China and Russia pledged to deepen military trust, expand joint exercises and patrols, strengthen coordination in bilateral and multilateral frameworks, and cooperate across almost every strategic domain: energy, finance, artificial intelligence, transport corridors, Arctic routes, media, education, publishing, and space. This is the language of long-term consolidation with an aggressor – and Kyiv cannot afford to ignore it.
Despite the efforts of Ukrainian and European diplomats, and despite President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s repeated personal appeals to Beijing, China is not using its leverage to isolate Russia or make the war strategically costly for Moscow. The declaration suggests the opposite: China’s support has helped push the war into a more consolidated phase. Once again, Russia receives diplomatic recognition, economic connectivity, political validation, and promises of continued cooperation across strategic sectors – even though major projects such as Power of Siberia 2 remain stalled. China, meanwhile, gains a partner in its challenge to Western influence and a continental relationship that strengthens its vision of Eurasian and global order.
The economic sections are especially important when read with the war in mind. The declaration praises bilateral trade, investment, energy cooperation, local currency settlement, customs cooperation, transport infrastructure, railway logistics, Arctic shipping, agricultural trade, and coordination between the Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union. These passages may look technical, but they are politically consequential. They describe the infrastructure of Russian resilience.
In a war of attrition, the ability to redirect trade, sustain energy exports, use non-Western financial channels, and build alternative logistics routes is not separate from the battlefield. It is part of Russia’s capacity to absorb sanctions, preserve strategic autonomy, and continue the war. For China, this is also a long-term strategic game: building the foundations of a non-Western economic and political order in which Russia remains a necessary continental partner.
This does not mean China wants uncontrolled escalation. Beijing still presents itself as a responsible power, a defender of stability, and a possible contributor to a political settlement. The declaration nonetheless exposes the difference between preventing escalation and opposing aggression. China may prefer a war that does not spiral into direct confrontation with NATO or nuclear instability, yet it says little about Russia’s own nuclear signaling. This silence is especially striking given recent Belarus-Russia nuclear drills, which involved training for the use of nuclear weapons. Notably, Belarus continues to host Russian tactical nuclear arms.
The information and media sections also deserve attention. China and Russia pledge to deepen media cooperation, support exchanges between mainstream outlets, expand digital diplomacy, counter what they describe as false information that damages bilateral cooperation, and resist external interference in the information space. In ordinary diplomatic language, this may sound like cultural and media exchange. In the context of Russia’s war, it also points to narrative discipline and propaganda consolidation. It leaves little room for Ukraine’s voice, which has been extremely limited and often filtered through censorship in China’s controlled information environment.
The historical memory sections perform a consolidated function. China and Russia repeatedly invoke World War II, the defense of historical truth, opposition to Nazism and militarism, and the legitimacy of the post-1945 international order. These references are part of the political grammar through which Moscow justifies its war and Beijing strengthens its own claims about historical justice, sovereignty, and anti-hegemonic struggle. For Ukraine, the problem is not the memory of World War II itself; Ukraine also paid an enormous price in that war. The problem is the instrumentalization of that memory to support a contemporary order in which Russia can claim anti-fascist legitimacy while attacking a neighboring state.
The declaration’s global sections further embed Ukraine in an anti-Western worldview. Before Ukraine is mentioned, the reader has already moved through long passages condemning hegemony, unilateral sanctions, protectionism, military blocs, external interference, NATO’s role in Asia, AUKUS, missile defense, nuclear sharing, and Western security policy. By the time the text reaches Ukraine, the interpretive framework has already been fixed. The war is no longer presented as Russia’s assault on a sovereign state. It is absorbed into a broader narrative in which instability is blamed on Western dominance and on the failure to create an equal, indivisible security order.
This is why the declaration matters beyond Moscow and Beijing. It is designed for the Global South as much as for the West. China and Russia know that many countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East do not view the war only through European security categories. They are also sensitive to food prices, energy shocks, sanctions, colonial memory, and accusations of Western double standards. The declaration uses these themes to place China and Russia on the side of development, sovereignty, and anti-hegemony. In this narrative, Ukraine is cast as part of a Western camp rather than as an independent sovereign state and a post-colonial nation resisting imperial violence.
For Sino-Ukrainian relations, the message is sobering. Ukraine cannot ignore China. Beijing is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a major economic power, and an influential actor in the Global South, where Ukraine’s presence remains limited. Kyiv needs channels to Beijing, not least to communicate its red lines, defend its narrative, and prevent Chinese diplomacy from being shaped exclusively through Moscow’s lens. Such engagement, however, must proceed without illusions.
The latest Putin-Xi declaration shows that China’s claimed neutrality is not equidistance. Russia explicitly praised China’s “objective and fair” position and welcomed Beijing’s constructive role in a political-diplomatic solution. That sentence is meant to enhance China’s image as a mediator. Instead, it reveals the problem. A mediator whose neutrality is certified by the aggressor, while the victim sees its reality erased, cannot simply be accepted as impartial. China may want to be useful in a future peace process, yet its current language remains much closer to Moscow’s worldview than to Kyiv’s experience.
Ukraine’s task, therefore, is not to reject dialogue with China. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, has been invited to visit China, and Kyiv should use this channel to make its position unmistakably clear. No peace can be built over Ukraine’s head. China’s commitment to territorial integrity cannot be reduced to an abstract principle; the “root causes” of the war must include Russian aggression and Ukraine’s security, not only Russian grievances; and any sustainable settlement must be based on Ukraine’s consent, international law, and the restoration of real – not rhetorical – sovereignty.
The night of May 23–24 in Kyiv is the reality against which the Putin-Xi declaration should be measured. The document speaks of a peace that does not exist in Ukraine. It invokes sovereignty while relativizing the sovereignty of the invaded state. It celebrates international law while embracing the power that has violated its most basic principles.
For Ukrainians, this is the parallel reality of China-Russia diplomacy. It is more sophisticated than pure propaganda, and therefore more consequential. It combines legal vocabulary, economic planning, historical memory, media coordination, anti-Western critique, and selective peace rhetoric into one strategic narrative. The declaration tells us how Beijing and Moscow want the world to understand the war: not as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but as a symptom of a Western-made disorder that only a new multipolar order can correct. In doing so, China risks whitewashing Russia’s aggression while asking the world to trust its image as a responsible stakeholder – a contradiction that history is unlikely to forget.
Ukraine should read the document carefully because it reveals both the limits and the necessity of its China policy. Beijing will not be persuaded by moral appeals alone, nor will it abandon Moscow simply because Kyiv or Europe ask it to. Yet Ukraine can still challenge the language, expose the contradictions, and insist that any global discussion of peace begin with the basic fact the declaration tries hardest to avoid: this is not an abstract “crisis.” It is Russia’s war against Ukraine.
