Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces had captured two Chinese men fighting for East Ukraine, potentially threatening a fragile peace effort during the three -year war.
Beijing is a diplomatic ally close to Moscow but is not known publicly for having directly helped in the large -scale invasion of the Kremlin, which US President Donald Trump seeks to end quickly.
Writing on X, where he published a video of one of the alleged men, Zelenskyy said that Kyiv had “information suggesting that there are many more Chinese citizens”. He did not say if Ukraine thought that men acted on the orders of Beijing.
“The involvement by Russia of China, as well as other countries, whether directly or indirectly, in this war in Europe is a clear signal that Putin intends to end the war,” he wrote, referring to the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for reuters to comment on what would be the first publicly announced case of Chinese nationals captured the fight against Russia in Ukraine. Reuters could not independently verify the complaints.
Writing on social networks, Andriy Kovalenko, member of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, called the mercenaries of the captured combatants but offered no other details.
Russia has used Iranian drones as well as North Korean missiles and artillery shells since its invasion of February 2022.
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kyiv also says that Pyongyang’s troops were deployed to fight Ukrainian forces in some parts of the Russian region in western Kursk, where Ukraine organized a lightning in lightning last summer.
“But there is a difference: the North Koreans were fighting on the Kursk front against us,” Zelenskyy said on Tuesday in a joint briefing in kyiv with Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever. “The Chinese are fighting on the territory of Ukraine.”
Russia has not yet publicly commented on Zelenskyy’s claim on Chinese fighters, and has not explicitly confirmed using North Korean troops in its Kursk region.
The spokesman for the US State Department Tammy Bruce said that the Chinese nationals captured in Ukraine were disturbing but had not said if Washington had checked the complaint.
China’s supply of dual -use articles to Russia makes it a major catalyst for the Russian war effort, said Bruce to journalists, adding that cooperation between Moscow and Beijing contributes to global instability.
Bruce announced that the American and Russian delegations will meet for the second time in Istanbul on April 10 to discuss “only” of the stabilization operations of the bilateral embassy, but that Ukraine is “absolutely not on the agenda”.
“These discussions are only focused on our embassy operations, and not on the normalization of a bilateral relationship overall, which cannot occur, as we have noted, once peace between Russia and Ukraine,” she added.
Zelenskyy, who said that men wore documents confirming their identity, told journalists that he hoped that their capture would encourage the United States to take a more difficult position on Russia in a peace process to end the fighting.
US and Russian officials have committed themselves in recent weeks in bilateral talks, arousing criticism from Ukraine who is wary of the conciliatory position of the Trump administration towards the Kremlin.
“I think the United States must pay more attention to what’s going on today,” said Zelenskyy. He added that Ukrainian forces had hired six Chinese fighters in total.
“We really hope that after this situation, the Americans will speak more with the Ukrainians, then with the Russians.”
In a separate declaration, the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrii Sybiha, said that kyiv had summoned the burden of China’s affairs in Ukraine “to condemn this fact and demand an explanation”.
China, which declared a limitless strategic partnership with Russia a few days before the invasion of Moscow, said that it was ready to play a role in the regulation of the war in Ukraine.
