The illusion of Chinese support was one of the many miscalculations that led Putin down the road to war
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has played a decisive — though publicly low-profile — role in strategic decision-making in both Washington and Moscow. As I report for the first time in my new book Overreach, it was a back-channel intervention approved by Beijing that caused the US to scupper a deal for the Poles to provide Soviet-made MiG-29 jets to the Ukrainian Air Force back in March. And since September a flurry of personal diplomacy by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi with NATO and the US has led to a rare moment of public agreement over Russia, when Xi Jinping said that the world “needs to prevent a nuclear crisis on the Eurasian continent” in a meeting with Joe Biden at the G20 summit in Bali.
