Ex-Ukrainian leader urges ’emergency measures’ for country in light of ‘new and alarming information’

A senior US administration official said that the recent meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping and the joint statement released following that meeting suggest that Beijing acknowledges Moscow’s actions toward Ukraine as “legitimate.” The official also described the closeness between the two nations “one of the most important and strategically significant alignments on the global stage.”

Putin and Xi met in Beijing on the day of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in China’s capital.

“The fact that Xi decided to meet with President Putin on the eve of the Olympics … while hundreds of thousands of troops and tanks on the Ukraine border, to have this broad reaching, really aligned set of global views, it’s hard to read this any other way than as, in many respects, an acknowledgement that doing this is legitimate, are thinking about actions in Ukraine are legitimate,” the official told reporters traveling with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. 

The official said the United States is “concerned by that.”

“We’ve been very clear in our private diplomacy with China that we’re concerned by the steps that they’ve taken and we will respond, as Secretary Blinken has indicated, to a variety of Russian firms. Some of those firms have relations with Chinese firms and there will be consequences there as well if this goes forward,” the official said Saturday.

Biden administration officials have warned that Russia could invade Ukraine “at any time,” including during the ongoing Beijing Olympics.

The senior administration official said that the relationship between Moscow and Beijing is “driven by the leaders, by Putin and Xi,” noting that “bureaucratically in both countries there are anxieties about the other, but not at the top level apparently.”

The alignment between the two nations has to be taken seriously, the official said, telling reporters, “we can’t downplay it.”

“They are working together, they are working in many circumstances to undermine us,” the official said. 

The official said the statement released by the two leaders following their early February meeting was a topic of discussion during Friday’s Quad meeting in Melbourne, noting “the Australians and the Indians and the Japanese all had strong views about what this, you know, 5,000-word kind of statement about common purpose means.”