By Dan Peleschuk
KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine has invited China’s foreign minister to visit amid growing dialogue that could eventually lead to a meeting between the two countries’ leaders, Kyiv’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
Beijing casts itself as neutral on the Kremlin’s 29-month-old invasion of Ukraine but maintains close ties with Moscow and sat out a Kyiv-organised peace summit in June.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba made his first wartime visit to China last week to meet his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. That was another sign that dialogue between Kyiv and Beijing is “developing very dynamically,” said Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi.
Work toward a possible future meeting between Presidents Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Xi Jinping was constant, he added. Since the start of the war, the two have only spoken once by telephone, in April 2023.
“Did … Minister Kuleba’s visit to China bring closer a potential meeting of the leaders of Ukraine and China? It indisputably did,” Tykhyi said at a briefing in Kyiv. It is, however, too early to tell when a meeting could take place, he added.
Kyiv has invited Wang to visit Ukraine and Beijing has indicated it was interested in the proposal, Tykhyi said.
“We are ready to welcome Minister Wang Yi in Ukraine to see first-hand the consequences of the Russian aggression against our country and hold deeper bilateral talks with him on a number of bilateral, regional and international issues,” he said.
In China, Kuleba told Wang after a day of “very deep and concentrated” talks that Kyiv was prepared for talks on the war with Russia only if Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity were fully respected.
China, the world’s second-largest economy, has provided diplomatic backing to Russia and helped keep its wartime economy afloat.
(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Alex Richardson, Deepa Babington and Conor Humphries)
