Wolf warrior diplomats

“According to international right those countries that have emerged from the ex-Soviet Union have no effective status in international right because there is no international accord that concretizes their status as a sovereign country.” Lu Shaye, Ambassador of China in France during an interview on French TV LCI.

The second remark of that wolf warrior that triggered international outcry is on the Crimean peninsula: At the question: Is Crimea Ukrainian? Lu Shaye answered: “It depends on how to see that problem. But there is history. Crimea belonged quite at the beginning to Russia.”

Three days after that interview, Mrs. Mao Ning, speaker of Chinese Department of Foreign Affairs declared: “China respects the sovereignty, independence and integrity of all countries and protects the principles of the Charter of the United Nations. China respects the status of sovereignty of the countries of the exSoviet Union after the dissolution of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.”

But she did not mention the Crimea racket.

French president Emmanuel Macron commented: “I believe that there is clarity in all Europeans on those excessive comments. There is a unanimous condemnation of the concerned countries.”

These concerned countries are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Russia. So according to Lu Shaye Russia, as a post-soviet state, is also not a sovereign country.

In 1994 Ukraine was represented as a sovereign nation in the Budapest Memorandum negotiations together with leaders of the United States, United Kingdom, and the Russian Federation. Ukraine agreed to transfer all her 1,700 nuclear warheads to Russia for disarmament. In return the signatories pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and inviolability of her borders and to refrain from the use or threat of military force. Russia breached these commitments with its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Now to Mr. Shaye’s utterance: At the beginning Crimea belonged to Russia. Many historic documents prove that the Ukrainian state appeared earlier than the Russian one. The name Ukraine was first mentioned in the Hypatian Chronicle that tells the campaign of Ukrainian Igor Svyatoslavich against Polovtsy in 1185. The term ‘Russia’ was first found only during the reign of Ivan the Terrible 362 years later. Kyiv was founded in 482 while Moscow was founded in 1147, so 665 years later. The first king of the Kyiv Rus, Daniel of Galicia, was crowned in 1253, while Ivan was crowned in 1547. As to religion the Kyiv Metropolia was founded in the year 988 while the Moscow Patriarchate commenced in 1458, so 460 years later.

So Crimea was already Ukrainian when Russia was not yet born. It is true that the Russian Empire under Tsaress Catherina II, a German princess, annexed the peninsula in 1783. She founded the port city of Sevastopol. But in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine because he believed that it does not matter to which Soviet Republic Crimea belongs as long as it is part of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

It is by far not the first blunder of that wolf warrior. In March 2021 the Chinese Embassy in a tweet called the French researcher Antoine Bondaz as a “mad hyena” and “ideological troll”, attracting a flurry of protests.

In 2021 Lu reported to Chinese media that French health workers abandoned their patients and let them die by hunger and sickness.

Madame Isabelle Lasserre of Le Figaro newspaper relates that the ambassador accused her of ‘having blood on her hands’ when she wrote on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The notion wolf warrior comes from a 2015 Chinese film in which a Chinese special forces warrior kills all the foreign mercenaries sent against him.

Wolf warrior diplomacy has been attributed to “Xi Jinping Thought”. It is confrontational and combative with its activists denouncing any perceived criticism of anything Chinese and including engaging in an open ideological struggle with the Western World.

The magazine ‘The diplomat’ newly titled: Xi Jinping leads China wolf warrior pack.

Since China Ambassador Huang Xilian in Manila warned about the fate of the 1,500 Filipinos in Taiwan in connection with the EDCA bases, he is regarded by many Filipinos as a wolf warrior.