Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have expressed their fury at the “completely unacceptable” comments made by Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, who in a recent TV interview directly challenged the sovereignty and international recognition of three Baltic states.
Lu’s remarks were prompted when LCI presenter Darius Rochebin asked him whether Beijing considered Crimea, the peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, to be part of Ukraine.
“It depends on how we perceive this problem,” Lu said.
“There’s a history here. Crimea was originally part of Russia. It was (Nikita) Khrushchev who offered Crimea to Ukraine during the period of the Soviet Union.”
Rochebin then interrupted and pointed out that, according to the borders recognised under international law, Crimea was indeed part of Ukraine.
“Even these ex-Soviet Union countries do not have effective status, as we say, under international law because there’s no international accord to concretise their status as a sovereign country,” Lu replied.
Asked by the presenter to clarify what he meant by that, Lu said it was unnecessary to “quibble about this sort of problem” and added the most important thing was to “achieve a ceasefire” in Ukraine.
The moment quickly went viral on Twitter and caught the attention of the three Baltic states, who voiced their shock and outrage at Lu’s particular interpretation of history.
The diplomatic spat continued on Monday as foreign affairs ministers from the European Union met in Luxembourg for a regular meeting.
“First of all, it’s completely unacceptable,” said Lithuania’s Gabrielius Landsbergis.
“We’re not post-Soviet countries, we’re countries that were illegally occupied by the Soviet Union.”
Landsbergis said the three Baltic states planned to summon the Chinese representatives based in their countries to “ask for clarifications.”
“This is a new phenomenon, we have not seen this happening before,” Landsbergis added, drawing a parallelism between Lu’s comments and Russian propagandists who question Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
“These are the narratives that we’ve been hearing from Moscow. And now it’s been sent out by another country which is, in our eyes, an ally of Moscow in many cases – if not militarily, politically at least,” Landsbergis said.
Estonia’s new foreign affairs minister Margus Tsahkna expressed a similar view and urged Beijing to give an explanation, while Latvia’s Edgars Rink?vi?s demanded a “complete retraction.”
The French government voiced its “dismay” at Lu’s remarks and expressed “full solidarity with all of our allies and concerned partners, who have won a long-awaited independence after decades of oppression.”
In a statement posted on its website, the Chinese embassy in France said the ambassador’s words were not a “political declaration, but an expression of personal views during a televised debate” that “should not be over-interpreted.”
In Beijing, a spokesperson of the foreign affairs ministry said “China respects all countries’ sovereignty.”
“The Soviet Union was a federal state and as a whole was one subject of international law in international relations. This does not negate the republics’ status as sovereign countries after the Soviet Union’s dissolution,” the spokesperson told reporters.
The latest diplomatic controversy comes at a very delicate moment in EU-China relations, with growing tensions over Beijing’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its efforts to promote a peace deal that Europeans see as biased and selective and the fraught situation in the Taiwan Strait.
Speaking to reporters on Monday morning, Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said the bloc needed to “reassess and recalibrate” its links with China in view of developments in recent years.
He also promised that the 27 foreign affairs ministers would issue a “strong” response in reaction to Lu’s remarks, which he had previously described as “unacceptable.”
“The EU can only suppose these declarations do not represent China’s official policy,” Borrell tweeted over the weekend.