State Department Warns to Hold China Accountable If Russia Gains Territory in Ukraine

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said China will be held accountable if Russia gains ground in Ukraine, given the tightening alliance between Beijing and Moscow.

In a Town Hall event hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations on April 9, Mr. Campbell said preserving peace and stability in Europe has long been a priority for the U.S. government and has been the “most important mission historically.”

“If Russian offenses continue and they gain territory in Ukraine, that will alter the balance of power in Europe in ways that are frankly unacceptable from our perspective,” Mr. Campbell said. “We have told China directly: If this continues, it will have an impact on the U.S.-China relationship—we will not sit by and say everything is fine.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently warned that Russia may launch a new offensive in May or summer.

“We will see this not as just a Russian unique set of activities but a conjoined set of activities backed by China [and] also North Korea. This is antithetical to our interests. And we’ve been clear and transparent with them about this,” he added, referring to Chinese authorities.

Mr. Campbell’s remark came one day after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping in China in a show of solidarity between the two neighbors. Weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Xi upgraded bilateral ties to a “no limits” partnership.

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Trade between China and Russia soared to $240 billion in 2023, an increase of 26.3 percent from a year earlier, according to China’s official data.

About half of Russia’s oil and petroleum exports last year went to China, Russia’s state-owned news agency TASS reported in December, citing Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak.

China had decided to “provide the necessary wherewithal in terms of machine tools, joint use capabilities, a whole variety of capacities to basically allow Russia to retool,” according to Mr. Campbell.

On April 2, President Joe Biden raised concerns about China’s “support for Russia’s defense industrial base and its impact on European and transatlantic security” in a phone call with Xi, according to a White House readout.

Before the Xi-Biden call, a senior administration official also raised the same issue when speaking to reporters.

“We’ve really seen the PRC start to help to rebuild Russia’s defense industrial base, essentially backfilling the trade from European partners, helping provide the components that get us slowly towards increasing Russia’s capabilities in Ukraine,” the official said at the time, referring to China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

The Department of Commerce has placed more than 40 Chinese entities on its export control list for allegedly supplying Russia’s military and defense industry.

A Ukrainian official told Reuters in April 2023 that Ukrainian forces were finding Chinese-made electronics from Russian weapons recovered from the battlefield.

“Let’s remember that the relationship that Xi has invested the most with globally is not a Western leader but President Putin. They’ve met dozens of times up to 50 times, hundreds of hours, they’ve endeavored to build a partnership that’s largely based on agreement with the West and the United States,” Mr. Campbell said.

Mr. Putin traveled to China to take part in a forum promoting China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as “One Belt, One Road”) in October 2023. The Russian leader met with Xi and said close foreign policy coordination between the two nations was “especially required.”

“I would just simply say that this is certainly an issue under active consideration,” he said, saying the travel advisories “have served as an inhibition to the kinds of rebuilding the kinds of people-to-people and other academic exchanges that we’ve seen in the past.”

Currently, the State Department’s travel advisories list China as a “Level 3: Reconsider Travel” destination, noting the risks of “arbitrary enforcement of local laws,” including exit bans.

The department warns that “U.S. citizens traveling or residing in the PRC may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime. U.S. citizens in the PRC may be subjected to interrogations and detention without fair and transparent treatment under the law.”