International Relations
Interview
China’s EVs and European Disunity: A Geoeconomic Playbook
7 October 2024
11 May 2023
Suggestions that Ukraine should make territorial concessions to obtain peace with Russia have been making the rounds since the start of the war.
Interestingly, they have come from parts of the Republican establishment in the United States, with Ron DeSantis, a likely contender for president in 2024, recently calling Russia’s aggression against a sovereign country a “territorial dispute”.
China, an ally of Russia, offered a “peace plan”, obviously favourable to Moscow, while Brazil’s President Lula da Silva has pitched “a G20 for peace in Ukraine”, urging Kyiv to give away Crimea. Essentially every meeting in the African and South American countries that I visited with advocacy trips in the last six months were arriving at the “we favour peace” argument. For some reason, this craving for peace contains a more or less implicit suggestion that Ukraine cede its territories or make other sovereignty compromises, such as abandoning the desire to join NATO or the EU to placate Moscow