The French authorities did not expect President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to China to significantly change Beijing’s position on the situation in Ukraine, but they do not consider it useless, Bloomberg reports, citing a high-ranking French official.
Macron’s talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping “paved the way” for “further joint work to achieve peace,” the source said. The official added that at the end of the last meeting between Macron and Xi on Friday, April 7, the Chinese leader thanked his French counterpart for “clarifying some issues.”
The agency notes that Macron hoped during the visit to convince Xi to “use his influence” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the fighting, but he did not succeed. In a joint statement that fell short of the French president’s hopes, Paris and Beijing agreed to “support any effort to restore peace in Ukraine on the basis of international law,” while Xi refrained from mentioning Russia or Putin in oral speeches. The Kremlin said after Macron’s trip that China is “not a country that changes its position so quickly under external influence.”
Macron’s visit lasted three days. On the trip, he was accompanied by the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who previously said that the development of relations between the European Union and China depends on the position that Beijing will further express in relation to the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine. At a meeting with Xi, Macron called on the Chinese leader to “bring Russia to reason and ‘sit everyone at the negotiating table’. He, in turn, replied that “China is ready, together with France, to appeal to the international community to remain rational and calm.”
Source: Rosbalt
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