France is “displeased” with the Chinese ambassador’s statements about the status of Crimea
On Saturday evening, France expressed its “displeasure” after the statements of the Chinese ambassador to France, in which he denied the sovereignty of the countries emanating from the Soviet Union and questioned the membership of Crimea in Ukraine.
In response to a question on Friday evening on the French channel LCI, Le Shay estimated that the countries of the former Soviet Union “do not have an effective place in international law because there is no international agreement to embody the status of a sovereign state.”
Regarding Crimea, a Ukrainian territory that Russia has occupied since 2014, he said: “It depends on how one perceives this problem. There is a history. Crimea was in the beginning for Russia. It was Khrushchev who gave Crimea to Ukraine in the days of the Union.” Soviet”. The Chinese diplomat called on people to stop “arguing” about the post-Soviet border issue. “The most urgent thing now is to stop, to achieve a ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine, he said.
The French Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it had “learned with alarm” of the remarks, and demanded that China “say (if) it reflects its position, which we hope is not the case.”
Ukraine was recognized internationally “within borders including Crimea in 1991 by the entire international community, including China, in the fall of the Soviet Union as a new member state of the United Nations,” Paris insisted, noting that Russia’s annexation of the peninsula Crimea in 2014 is “illegal under international law.”
If Beijing says it is officially neutral, Chinese President Xi Jinping has never condemned the Russian invasion or even spoken on the phone, until now, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Conversely, he recently went to Moscow to reaffirm his partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the guise of an anti-Western front.
