February 18, 2023, 7:03 PM
February 18, 2023, 7:03 PM
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday urged China to avoid incidents like the one who led the United States to shoot down a Chinese balloon and warned it about the “consequences” of giving aid to Russia in the war in Ukraine.
Blinken made these warnings in a meeting with the head of Chinese diplomacy, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference (Germany).
The relationship between the two powers became notoriously tense after the US military will shoot down a Chinese balloon on February 4 that flew over their airspace.
Such an incident “must not happen again,” Blinken said in the meeting with Wang, according to a State Department spokesman.
“The secretary made it clear that the United States will not tolerate any violation of its sovereignty,” he added. Blinken was “very direct and frank,” he continued.
Wang, for his part, “urged the United States to change course and acknowledge and make amends for the damages his excessive use of force caused in relations between China and the United States,” reported the official Chinese news agency Xinhua.
The United States maintains that the Chinese balloon was a spy devicealthough Beijing alleges that it was only a meteorological research device that had mistakenly entered that area.
A few hours earlier, Wang had denounced the “hysterical” reaction of the United States to detect the balloon.
The incident led Blinken to postpone a visit to Beijing.
– Warnings about Ukraine –
Blinken also warned Wang of the “implications and consequences” of providing “material support” to Russia in its war against Ukraine.
At the Security Conference, US Vice President Kamala Harris accused Russia of committing “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine.
According to Harris, Russian forces carried out a “widespread and systematic attack” against the population of the former Soviet republic.
Harris cited cases of summary executions, torture and rape by Russian forces in Ukraine, as well as “the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians” to Russia.
This is the first time that Washington has formally designated Moscow as responsible for this type of crime since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba welcomed the US position, while acknowledging the difficulty of collecting enough evidence to bring “specific individuals” who committed “atrocities” to justice.
– The Putin Factor –
The French President, Emmanuel Macron, and the German head of government, Olaf Scholz, also participated in the Munich Conference, who called for intensifying support for Ukraine.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged “Give Ukraine what it needs to win and prevail as a sovereign and independent nation in Europe” and I assert that the “biggest risk” would be that Russian President Vladimir Putin would get away with the race.
“The biggest risk of all is that Putin wins. If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get whatever they want,” he said.
Western countries, led by the United States, have donated billions of dollars in arming the ukrainian governmentincluding artillery and air defense systems, but the kyiv Executive says it needs more for its counteroffensive to succeed.
On the ground, the Russian army claimed this Saturday the capture of Grianykivka, a small village in the Kharkiv region, in northeastern Ukraine.
The day before, the Wagner paramilitary group announced that it had conquered a town near Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, the scene of one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the conflict.
