Biden to speak with Xi in bid to keep pressuring Putin

Bloomberg

President Joe Biden will speak on Friday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, as the US leader looks to shore up global pressure on Russia to halt its war in Ukraine.
“This is part of our ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement. “The two leaders will discuss managing the competition between our two countries as well as Russia’s war against Ukraine and other issues of mutual concern.”
The call is Biden and Xi’s first since November, and follows a meeting in Rome between National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi.
China has avoided public criticism of Moscow for the war, and Xi and Vladimir Putin declared in the weeks before the invasion that their countries’ friendship had “no forbidden zones.” China has also said it wants to avoid being impacted by US sanctions over the war in Ukraine.
The Biden administration has tried to persuade Beijing to not contribute to the war. The White House’s view is that Beijing is tacitly supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China denies that is the case, and Chinese officials said they want to see the conflict end. The US has repeatedly warned China it would suffer consequences if it provided direct support for Russia in the war.
China’s foreign ministry endorsed remarks by its envoy to Ukraine, in which Beijing delivered some of its most supportive comments yet towards the war-torn country.
Ambassador Fan Xianrong had told Lviv Governor Maksym Kozytskyi during a meeting that China was a “friendly country for the Ukrainian people” and would “never attack Ukraine,” according to a summary posted on the Lviv government’s website. He went on to praise the strength and unity demonstrated by the Ukrainian people, in an apparent reference to their efforts to resist Russia’s ongoing invasion.
Asked about Fan’s comments at a news conference, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said: “China surely supports these remarks by
our ambassador in Ukraine. China supports all efforts that are conducive to easing the
situation and for a political settlement.”
A day earlier, Zhao had said he was “not aware” of the comments, fuelling uncertainty about whether Fan was expressing the central government’s position.
The world’s two largest economies also continue sparring over human rights and economic policies. The Biden administration has yet to unveil actions against what it considers China’s harmful non-market practices.
Biden and Xi last spoke in November, during a video conference in which Biden stressed that the two superpowers need to establish guardrails to ensure their competition doesn’t veer into conflict.