Scholz warns China against sending weapons to Russia
BERLIN — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Sunday that there would be “consequences” if China sent weapons to Russia for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, but he’s fairly optimistic that Beijing will refrain from doing so.
Scholz’s comments came in an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, two days after he met President Joe Biden in Washington.
U.S. officials have warned recently that China could step off the sidelines and begin providing arms and ammunition to Moscow.
Ahead of his trip, Scholz had urged Beijing to refrain from sending weapons and instead use its influence to press Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine.
Asked by CNN if he could imagine sanctioning China if it did aid Russia, Scholz replied: “I think it would have consequences, but we are now in a stage where we are making clear that this should not happen, and I’m relatively optimistic that we will be successful with our request in this case, but we will have to look at (it), and we have to be very, very cautious.”
He didn’t elaborate on the nature of the consequences.
Germany has Europe’s biggest economy, and China has been its single biggest trading partner in recent years.
Back in Germany on Sunday, Scholz was asked after his Cabinet met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen whether he had received concrete evidence from the U.S. that China was considering weapons deliveries and whether he would back sanctions against Beijing if it helped arm Russia.
“We all agree that there must be no weapons deliveries, and the Chinese
government has stated that it wouldn’t deliver any,” the chancellor replied. “That is what we are demanding, and we are watching it.”
Von der Leyen said that “we have no evidence for this so far, but we must observe it every day.”
In related news from the war Sunday:
Russian shelling destroyed at least five homes and killed a 65-year-old man Sunday in Kupiansk, a town in Kharkiv province in northern Ukraine that is 18 miles from the from the Russian border.
Two civilians were killed over the past day in Bakhmut, Donetsk province Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said. Russian forces have spent months trying to capture the city as part of their offensive in eastern Ukraine, and the area has seen some of the bloodiest ground fighting of the war. In recent days, Ukrainian units destroyed two key bridges just outside Bakhmut, including one linking it to the nearby town of Chasiv Yar along the last remaining Ukrainian resupply route, according to U.K. military intelligence
officials and other Western analysts.
In southern Ukraine, a woman and two children were killed in a residential building in the Kherson region village of Poniativka, the Ukrainian president’s office reported.
A Russian artillery shell hit a car in Burdarky, another Kharkiv province village, killing a man and his wife, the regional prosecutor’s office said.
Ukraine’s emergency services reported Sunday that the death toll from a Russian missile strike that hit a five-story apartment building in southern Ukraine on Thursday rose to 13.
One of the few areas where Russia and Ukraine have cooperated during the war is grain shipments. On that front, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Sunday his country is engaged in “intense efforts” to extend an agreement that allowed Ukraine to export grain from its Black Sea ports.
The deal, which the U.N. and Turkey brokered in July 2022 and was extended by four months in November, is set to expire March 18.