Burc Eruygur and Riyaz ul Khaliq
01 March 2023•Update: 01 March 2023
ISTANBUL
China’s President Xi Jinping on Wednesday told his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko that Beijing’s “core stance” on the Ukraine crisis is “facilitating dialogue for peace,” local media said.
During his two-day state visit to China at Xi’s invitation, Lukashenko “totally agreed and supported China’s position and proposal to deal with the crisis with a political solution,” the Chinese daily Global Times reported.
China last month made an offer to help find a political solution to the Russia-Ukraine war, emphasizing that negotiation is the only viable option for ending the current crisis.
It released a 12-point paper on the political settlement of the crisis on the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war.
“This is important to defuse the crisis,” Lukashenko told Xi.
Xi said the China-Belarus friendship is “unbreakable.”
“We should always be true friends,” Xi told Lukashenko, lauding Belarus’ firm support for China’s stance on questions related to Taiwan, Xinjiang, and human rights.
The statement released by Minsk on the meeting did not directly address the Moscow-Kyiv war.
Lukashenko told Xi, according to the statement, that “the meeting is taking place at a very difficult time, requiring new non-standard approaches and responsible political decisions.”
“They should be aimed primarily at preventing a slide into a global confrontation in which there will be no winners,” the Belarusian president said.
Extending support to China’s proposal on international security, Lukashenko said: “That is why Belarus actively comes up with proposals for peace, fully supports the initiative you put forward on international security.”
On the bilateral front, Lukashenko said Belarus was “interested in deepening cooperation with China on technological development, including the creation of joint ventures, the modernization of Belarusian enterprises with the introduction of modern Chinese technologies, the promotion of goods and services to the markets of third countries.”
Belarus, a close ally of Russia, has aided Moscow’s ongoing war on Ukraine -- which has decimated large swathes of the country and led to mass deaths and displacements -- but is not a direct party to the war, which began more than a year ago.
