“We should stop expecting China’s behavior to change after yet another meeting between Xi and Trump. Instead, it is more relevant to discuss another question that Western politicians and experts have increasingly been raising lately: could this cooperation evolve into a scenario of a coordinated simultaneous attack, in which Russia attacks a NATO member state in Eastern Europe while China launches an operation in the Indo-Pacific? And is the West prepared for such a scenario?”

Nataliya Butyrska, Associate Senior Fellow at the New Europe Center, explains on “Mirror of the Week” why the upcoming meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump is unlikely to change China’s position on the war in Ukraine and why expectations that Beijing could act as a peacemaker are a result of China’s policy of strategic ambiguity.

In her analysis, Nataliya Butyrska examines:

• why China has viewed the Russia-Ukraine war from the outset through the prism of its own confrontation with the United States, and what lies behind its “neutral” position;
• how military-technical cooperation between Russia and China is deepening — from supplies of electronics and drone components to the training of Chinese military personnel in Russia;
• whether the West is prepared for a scenario involving a coordinated simultaneous attack by Russia and China.

Read more via the link here (in Ukrainian).