Beijing has been forced to backtrack after its ambassador to France sparked a furore in Europe at the weekend by questioning the legal status of former Soviet states and Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea.
China’s foreign ministry on Monday contradicted the comments from Lu Shaye, who had infuriated European capitals and fuelled distrust about Beijing’s ambitions to mediate the war in Ukraine by suggesting that former Soviet states lacked “effective status under international law”.
Lu added that the issue of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, was “not simple to answer with a few words”.
China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a press briefing on Monday: “After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, China was one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with relevant countries.
“China respects the sovereign status of the republics after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.”
Later on Monday, the Chinese embassy in Paris posted a statement online saying that Lu’s “remarks on the Ukraine issue were not a statement of policy but an expression of personal views”.
French president Emmanuel Macron said: “I think it is not the place of a diplomat to hold this kind of language.”
The French foreign ministry summoned the Chinese ambassador on Monday.
Following Lu’s remarks, which were made in an interview with French news channel LCI, France’s foreign ministry demanded that Beijing clarify its position. Mykhailo Podolyak, Ukraine’s presidential adviser, described Lu’s version of the history of Crimea as “absurd”.
Asked whether China would retract Lu’s comments, Mao responded: “What I can tell you is that my answer on the previous question represents the formal position of the Chinese government.”
Analysts suggested that the foreign ministry’s response represented a repudiation of the remarks from Lu, who has built a reputation as one of China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats known for their combative style.
Lu had said that “these ex-Soviet Union countries do not have effective status under international law because there is no international accord to concretise their status as a sovereign country”.
“Legally speaking, [Lu’s stance] is a misstatement, which is not compatible with the position the Chinese government has declared many times,” said Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “Politically, it further deteriorates relations with eastern European countries, and potentially has a ripple effect on central Asian ones.”
The three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia said they would summon senior Chinese diplomats on Tuesday to protest against Lu’s remarks, which a number of ministers condemned.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s foreign minister, said the remarks were “completely unacceptable” and demonstrated why the Baltic states did not trust Beijing’s intentions as a peace broker in Ukraine.
Latvia’s foreign ministry noted that Lu’s comments “clearly contradict” China’s position in support of the “sovereignty, independence and territorial indivisibility of countries”.
Italy’s Antonio Tajani said he disagreed with the ambassador’s comments, adding that China must “respect all [EU] member states”.
EU foreign affairs ministers were planning to discuss Lu’s comments at a meeting in Luxembourg on Monday as part of a wider conference to “assess and recalibrate” the bloc’s stance towards Beijing, the EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell said ahead of the talks.
But China’s efforts to walk back the ambassador’s claims were unlikely to satisfy the Baltics, which argue they were never part of the Soviet Union because they were illegally annexed. Most western countries did not recognise that annexation.
“Lithuania never joined the USSR. Moscow illegally occupied our territory, so we resisted until we restored our independence and the Red Army went back home. We’re not post-Soviet, we’re never-Soviet,” Landsbergis wrote on Twitter.
More than 80 parliamentarians from various European countries signed a petition calling for the French government to declare Lu “persona non grata”, meaning they would no longer recognise him as a diplomat.
