A “window for peace is opening” in Ukraine, China’s top diplomat told a meeting of G20 foreign ministers on Thursday, as the Trump administration ramps up its push to end the war in close coordination with Russia.
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov on the margins of the gathering in South Africa, the first high-level talks between the two close partners since US President Donald Trump upended America’s stance on the conflict this month with a sweeping pivot toward Moscow.
That’s seen top Trump officials hold bilateral talks with Moscow over Kyiv’s head and launch a barrage of criticism against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with a senior American official warning on Thursday that the US is losing patience with Kyiv.
The G20 foreign ministers’ meeting, which was not attended by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, came as the breakneck diplomacy has left Europe and China on the sidelines and raised questions about a shifting balance of power in a fraught geopolitical landscape.
China “supports all efforts dedicated to peace, including the recent consensus reached between the US and Russia,” Wang told counterparts at the gathering in Johannesburg.
A “window for peace is opening” on the war, he added.
The war and US relations were among subjects discussed between the top Chinese diplomat and Lavrov on the meeting sidelines, a Russian readout said. The two sides – which have tightened their relations during the war – also praised their growing cooperation.
On Ukraine, both countries appeared to agree that it was necessary to address the conflict’s “root causes” – an apparent veiled reference to NATO – with Russia’s readout attributing this sentiment to Wang and China’s attributing this to Lavrov.
Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago in an uninterrupted onslaught that has killed tens of thousands and displaced about 10 million people. The invasion has also laid waste to Ukrainian cities and drawn allegations of war crimes by Moscow’s forces, which are entrenched in parts of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Even though Russia invaded its neighbor, Beijing and Moscow have blamed NATO expansion as the cause of the conflict – part of their broader shared opposition to the US system of alliances they see as positioned against their interests.
Lavrov earlier this week praised Trump for being what he described as “the first Western leader” to acknowledge publicly that the “cause of the Ukrainian conflict was the efforts … to expand NATO.”
Russia has long claimed that expansion of the US-led defense alliance put its security under threat, necessitating its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That claim has been dismissed by Western leaders as a bogus justification for launching its war.
The sharp shift in US positioning on the conflict was underscored Thursday as Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz described the US president’s “frustration” with Zelensky following a meeting between the Ukrainian leader and the US’ Russia-Ukraine envoy Keith Kellog in Kyiv.
“President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelensky — the fact that — that he hasn’t come to the table, that he hasn’t been willing to take this opportunity that we have offered,” Waltz told a news briefing in Washington, referencing an economic deal that the Trump administration has so far been unsuccessful in convincing Kyiv to accept.
“I think he eventually will get to that point, and I hope so very quickly,” Waltz said, echoing comments he made before the Kellogg-Zelensky meeting, urging the Ukrainian leader to “sign the deal.”
Trump-Zelensky rift
Waltz’s comments came amid what has been a deepening rift between Trump and Zelensky that has cast more uncertainty over how Ukraine’s interests would be represented in future talks on ending the war.
Trump ramped up his long-standing criticism of Ukraine’s leader in recent days, parroting Kremlin rhetoric that wrongly accuses Kyiv of starting the war with Russia and questioning Zelensky’s legitimacy to lead since he suspended an election due to the invasion.
After Zelensky hit back, accusing the US president of being in a “disinformation space,” Trump escalated the fight on Wednesday, calling Zelensky “a Dictator without elections” in a scathing post on his platform Truth Social.
Following talks Thursday with envoy Kellogg, Zelensky appeared keen to stress Ukraine’s interest in maintaining strong US relations.
“General Kellogg’s meeting is one that restores hope, and we need strong agreements with America, agreements that will really work,” Zelensky said in his nightly address to the Ukrainian people.
“Economy and security must always go hand in hand, and the details of the agreements matter: the better the details, the better the result.”
Kellogg and Zelensky’s team had discussed Ukraine’s prisoners of war, and “the need for a reliable and clear system of security guarantees so that the war does not return,” the Ukrainian president added.
The meeting followed a sit down earlier this month between Zelensky and US Vice President JD Vance on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich.
In his comments Thursday, national security adviser Waltz defended Washington’s “shuttle diplomacy” approach to speak with Russian and Ukrainian counterparts separately.