NATO member: China can end Ukraine war with a single phone call to Putin

“They would have no other choice,” he continued.

Representatives of the Russian and Chinese foreign ministries did not immediately respond to BI’s requests for comment outside regular business hours.

Stubb, whose country joined the NATO military alliance in April last year, told the newspaper that brokering a peaceful solution to the Ukraine war was in China’s interest.

“If China is truly interested in harmonious relations between nation-states, it cannot allow a country like Russia to wage an imperial, ultimately aggressive and colonial war against an independent nation-state,” Stubb said.

“This is the right thing to do. And it would also be a sign of China’s leadership,” he added.

Certainly China has called for peace in Ukraine.

In May, Xi received Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing. During the meeting, he stressed China’s desire for an international peace conference involving Russia and Ukraine.

Notably, China did not attend a Ukrainian peace conference in Switzerland in June because Russia was not invited.

“China has always insisted that an international peace conference must be supported by both Russia and Ukraine, with equal participation of all parties, and that all peace proposals should be discussed in a fair and equal manner,” Mao Ning, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on May 31 about Switzerland’s efforts.

However, some analysts believe that China does not want an end to the war.

“Despite the fact that China has repeatedly called for a negotiated solution in Ukraine, America’s continued support for Kyiv – and thus Russia’s inability to achieve its goals in the short term – is actually in Beijing’s interests,” Chels Michta, a nonresident fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said in his analysis in May.

In his article, Michta argued that an escalation of the war into European NATO territory would “draw the United States even deeper into the war zone.”

An escalation, Michta argued, would also limit the US’s ability to “respond to a crisis in Asia,” giving China the opportunity to gain “regional hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.”

“It must therefore be obvious that Ukraine is extremely important to China and that a prolonged conflict is very much in its interest,” Michta wrote.