Cash-hungry Ukraine embraces China
ZAPORIZHIA,
Ukraine - The president of a top Ukrainian aerospace company says its new Chinese investors often ask the staff for “little conversations” said Vyacheslav Boguslayev, whose sprawling Soviet-era company, Motor Sich, is one of the most advanced military aircraft engine manufacturers in the world.
Racing to upgrade its military, China has been turning to Ukraine. And Ukraine - with its economy scrambled by hostilities with Russia - has been willing to accept China’s embrace.
“If they ban us from working with China,” Boguslayev said, “then the first thing I’ll do is fire 10,000 people.”
Motor Sich, dubbed the “Czar of Engines” in the Chinese media, has what Beijing wants: It can supply warplane engines and the know-how to one day possibly make a Chinesebuilt version.
The Chinese, in turn, have what Motor Sich wants: reliable buyers.
The company lost its biggest market - supplying engines for military helicopters and other aircraft in Russia - after war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Now it sells mainly to China.
China’s under-the-radar push into Ukraine illustrates Beijing’s hunger for technology imports and its ability to access them even though Western countries have limited military-related exports to China.
It comes as Ukraine struggles to reorient its economy away from Russia. And it puts Washington in a quandary as U.S. rhetoric supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia collides with the Trump administration’s widening competition with Beijing.
“Local people here are calm, well educated and inexpensive,” Liu Tsiun, the trade and economic adviser at the Chinese Embassy in Kiev, said in an interview, speaking fluent Russian at the embassy’s walled villa in the Ukrainian capital. “I always think of Ukraine as having great potential in technology and science.”
Ukraine’s factories once churned out tanks, battleships and intercontinental ballistic missiles for the Red Army. They became key to the Russian defence industry’s supply chain.
In 2014, Ukraine’s prowestern revolution and the outbreak of hostilities with Moscow-backed separatists spurred Kiev to seek markets beyond Russia - its biggest neighbour and trading partner.
But European and American investors were nervous about dealing with a country reeling from war, with crumbling infrastructure and widespread corruption. China, on the other hand, saw an opportunity. Ukrainian companies such as Motor Sich, based in the city of Zaporizhia, about 100 miles from the front line in eastern Ukraine, grew desperate as sales to Russia dried up.