After China meeting, Blinken says Beijing’s talk of Ukraine peace ‘doesn’t add up’

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By Humeyra Pamuk, Simon Lewis and David Brunnstrom

NEW YORK (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken underscored strong U.S. concerns about China’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base in talks on Friday with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, saying Beijing’s talk of peace in Ukraine “doesn’t add up.”

In a meeting with Wang on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Blinken said he also raised China’s “dangerous and destabilizing actions” in the South China Sea and discussed improving communication between their militaries.

Blinken told a press conference he and Wang also discussed ways to disrupt the flow of drugs into the United States, and the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

About 70 percent of the machine tools Russia is importing and 90 percent of the microelectronics come from China and Hong Kong, Blinken added.

That was materially helping Moscow to produce the missiles, rockets, armored vehicles and munitions needed to perpetuate its war, he said.

“So when Beijing says that, on the one hand, it wants peace, it wants to see an end to the conflict, but on the other hand, is allowing its companies to take actions that are actually helping Putin continue the aggression, that doesn’t add up.”

Wang said his country’s position on the war in Ukraine had always emphasized the need for peace through talks, China’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

“The United States should stop smearing and planting evidence against China, imposing sanctions indiscriminately, and using this (conflict) … to create and encourage confrontations between different camps,” it cited Wang as saying.

On Friday, China and Brazil pressed ahead with an effort to gather developing countries behind a Ukraine peace plan, despite President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s dismissal of the initiative as serving Moscow’s interests.

The meeting of 17 nations was chaired by Wang and Brazilian foreign policy adviser Celso Amorim. Wang told reporters they discussed the need to prevent escalation, avoid use of weapons of mass destruction and prevent attacks on nuclear power plants.

The White House and the European Union said this week they were deeply concerned by a Reuters report that Russia has set up a weapons program in China to develop and produce long-range attack drones for use in the war.

Earlier on Friday, Wang declined to comment on the report, when queried by a reporter at the U.N. headquarters.

Blinken said “pressing Iran, North Korea and China … to stop providing weapons, artillery, machinery and other support” to Russia was crucial to achieving a lasting peace in Ukraine.

China and the United States, the world’s two biggest economies, are at odds on a wide range of issues such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, U.S. export curbs on advanced chip technology, trade tariffs, Taiwan and human rights.

Beijing has repeatedly complained about U.S. ties and arms supplies to Taiwan. It has also urged the United States to scrap tariffs on its goods and denounced U.S. proposals to ban its software and hardware in vehicles due to national security concerns.

Last week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said the challenges to the U.S. posed by China exceeded those of the Cold War

Relations plummeted last year after the United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon, but both have since sought to keep open lines of communication to prevent, the U.S. says, competition from spiraling into conflict.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan met Chinese President Xi Jinping last month at the end of talks to ease frictions ahead of November’s U.S. election.

The White House said then a call was being planned soon between Xi and U.S. President Joe Biden.

Asked about this after meeting Wang, Blinken said he had nothing to announce, but the two officials had agreed on the importance of their leaders communicating and added: “I fully anticipate that we’ll see that in the weeks and months ahead.”

(Reporting by David Brunnstrom, Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis; Additional reporting by Joe Cash in Beijing; Editing by Howard Goller and Alistair Bell)