By this time, Ukraine must have many regrets. Among those, two stand out as the most regretful — the sale of the aircraft carrier Varyag to China in April 1998 and the handover of its nuclear weapons to Russia in 1996.
In retrospect, Ukraine would wish that both actions had not been taken, but the damage has been done.
In 1996, at the urging of then-US president Bill Clinton, Ukraine sped up, and actually completed, the handover of the country’s nuclear arsenal in exchange for assurances of its territorial security and integrity delineated by the Budapest Agreement of 1994 and signed by five parties — the US, the UK, Russia, China and France.
Last year, after years refurbishing the vessel, China successfully placed its first aircraft carrier in service, thanks to the Ukrainian ready-built hulk.
In early March, Russia trashed the Budapest Agreement and invaded Crimea.
Given that China has been enjoying almost unlimited access to Ukraine’s military technologies over the past decade and a half, it would have been expected to lend support on behalf of Ukraine. However, China acquiesced when Russia annexed Crimea in late March. Russian assurance weighs less than the paper on which it was written.
Worst yet, China is now threatening countries, including Taiwan, in the East and the South China seas with the aircraft carrier.
Decisions made and actions taken at an earlier time in a seemingly benign setting often have unexpected, sometimes malignant, consequences.
Ukraine’s sale of the ship to China under the pretext that it was to be converted into a floating hotel is exactly one of those decisions thought innocuous when it was made.
The past few days, Russia has dispatched half a dozen of its naval cruisers and frigates to China for a joint exercise. In the meantime, a Chinese oil rig with a military escort has anchored in disputed waters near Vietnam, with the action stirring up riots against Taiwanese and Japanese investments in several Vietnamese cities.
There is a huge difference between a floating, commercial hotel and a mobile airfield equipped with dozens of attack fighters. A self-powered platform carrying unmanned aerial drones in the Strait of Malacca, or the Taiwan Strait, is perhaps not what Ukraine had envisioned when it decided to sell the ship.
The financial gain that Ukraine derived is not only now a thorn in the side of Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines, but also a boomerang that can potentially bite Ukraine too.
Kengchi Goah is a senior research fellow at the Taiwan Public Policy Council in the US.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS