The tight-lipped statement didn’t mention Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. But that’s hardly surprising. For much of Europe, the outcome of the war is existential: all eyes are currently on China to see if it will back Putin. Just days before Russia’s invasion, Xi Jinping and Putin announced that the friendship between their two nations had “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation”. Yet in the weeks since, Xi has been distracted: he has far more pressing issues to worry about than war in far-off Ukraine.

While bombs rain down on Mariupol, Covid remains the main story in China. Much of the rest of world has opened up, including India, but China and Japan remain major outliers. This week, the mega-city of Shanghai, with a population nearly half that of the UK, is being locked down; first, its futuristic eastern zone of skyscrapers and towers, and next week, its western half defined by its British-style art deco waterfront, the Bund.

Stories of commuters emptying shelves in supermarkets fill the headlines, just as in Britain in spring 2020. Hong Kong’s politics is no longer dominated by the struggle for democracy. Instead, public anger, still more freely expressed than in the mainland, has attacked Chief Executive Carrie Lam for a policy that has seen the city isolated from the world and the Chinese mainland for weeks, but still ravaged by growing deaths, particularly among the unvaccinated and elderly.

The economic and social turmoil that Covid has brought to China has shaped its reaction to Ukraine. It is certainly true that China will seek to strengthen its geopolitical position where it can — as indeed does every other major power. However, right now, any decisions on Ukraine will almost certainly be filtered through a domestic lens first and foremost. What will any decision do to the economy? How will it affect the march toward a third term in office for Xi, a decision unprecedented in the modern era but likely to be achieved this autumn at the Party Congress? These are hard questions to answer: no wonder that Xinhua readout was so short.

China’s relationship with Ukraine is part of the equation. Since 2019, China has been Ukraine’s largest single trading partner. And Ukraine is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, along with Russia. For years, Ukraine was proof that European powers at odds with the EU could find friends in Beijing; Serbia being another example.

China also imports grain from Ukraine, not in a way that makes it dependent on that supply in the way that some Middle Eastern countries are, but usefully nonetheless. And it has invested heavily in projects in Ukraine such as a metro rail system and wind energy farms, which it would presumably want to keep going in the event of a peace deal. A settlement that allows China to restore Ukraine to its existing place in its economic matrix would be welcome; whether Putin will permit that is another matter.

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There are also small, but significant opportunities for China to burnish its global image in its handling of the Ukraine crisis. It has plenty of peacekeeping experience via the UN, and actually has more peacekeeping troops trained than any other permanent member of the UN security council. In theory, then, its troops could be part of a UN force that keeps order, assuming that Russian soldiers would be unacceptable to the Ukrainians.

However, this remains unlikely, even if the UN does play a central role in any potential settlement. Past experience shows that China is uncomfortable with the political aspects of peacekeeping — particularly post-civil conflict resolution in sub-Saharan Africa — as it involved bringing civil society and opposition groups into authorised dialogue with government, something which China does not do at home.

Overall, China is much more comfortable talking about physical and economic reconstruction, as it did when it offered to build roads for the Taliban regime last year. But cash alone is not going to settle the Ukraine situation. As its relative distance from the current talks in Istanbul have shown, China is not yet ready to step up as a prominent mediator with a democratic state, just as Western actors have sometimes struggled in the past to deal with hybrid or semi-authoritarian states.

There is another area where China may use Ukraine for political rethinking: on Taiwan. It is far too simple to read Taiwan as a direct analogy to Ukraine, and Beijing does not do so. It has been thinking about the Taiwan issue for years, and regards it as a matter of internal politics, not an external breach of sovereignty. However, one revelation from the past month should surely have set alarm bells ringing: the massive miscalculation by Russia’s political and military elites about the nationalist sentiment and will for resistance of the Ukrainian people.

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The case of Russia suggests that a propaganda echo chamber does not produce good intelligence; if you only listen to your own propaganda, you can’t be surprised when it turns out to be wrong. There are thoughtful voices in the Chinese foreign policy world, muted but audible, that have suggested that China should take its own rhetoric about the decadence and weakness of the West with a pinch of the delicious weijing that makes much Chinese food so sharp.

The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly introduced a programme in selected universities and schools to educate children on the correct approach to understanding the “tragedy” of the Ukraine situation. The overall message is that the crisis is the fault of the West, and Chinese sympathy should take Russia’s feelings into account. Yet the programme still pulls its punches, and it’s still a long way from all-out support for Moscow.

According to the South China Morning Post, one university pledged to provide “positive guidance to ignite their learning passions as the Russia-Ukraine situation remains a hot topic for students,” while another addressed “the fundamental causes to Ukraine’s national tragedy.” But a clear direction on who is right and who is wrong is singularly lacking.

Like the rest of the world, China is going through a period of maximal uncertainty. Just as in recent years the British have adopted the term “permacrisis” to describe the endless rolling news cycle, the Chinese now speak of the world “going through major changes not seen for a century” (“bainian weiyou zhi da bianju”). China may have a five-year plan for its economy, but right now, regarding Ukraine, it appears that Beijing is as uncertain as the rest of us as to what the next five minutes might bring.

In the late-1990s, I witnessed North American United Nations (UN) personnel visiting a local brothel in Pristina, Kosovo. Despite warnings that anyone caught frequenting such places would be disciplined and sent home, the men were never called to task, and buying and using women and girls for sex became embedded within so-called peacekeeping culture.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2003, there were 150 allegations of sexual assault by peacekeepers at MONUC (the new name for the United Nations Mission there). These allegations included rape, child abuse and prostitution. Reports also alleged instances of torture, the pornographic filming of Congolese women and children by UN peacekeepers, and the fathering of babies by these men. One case even included an employee who filmed himself torturing and sexually assaulting naked young girls.

The exposure of this abuse in 2004 by a number of UN peacekeepers in the DRC resulted in UN staff admitting they had seen male colleagues exploiting young and vulnerable locals during overseas missions. This sparked the start of a genuine effort to end such corrupt practices. But the problem hasn’t gone away.

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By Julie Bindel

In 2016, there were 65 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse against civilians, and 80 allegations against female colleagues by male UN personnel. There were at least 311 known victims, of whom 309 were female. Not enough is being done to protect these vulnerable individuals from the very people whose job it is to help them.

Some of the vile acts committed by UN personnel are not even criminal, such as paying for sex in countries where the sex trade is so normalised that the punters are free to do whatever they want to prostituted women. I have spoken with several people close to the UN who even use the casual term ‘transactional sex’ to sanitise the act of sexual exploitation that takes place via prostitution. One UN woman told me: “I have heard men justify buying sex from desperate, teenaged women in [African countries] by claiming that they are helping her feed her kids.”

The problem, of course, is not confined to UN personnel. A seasoned aid worker who asked to remain anonymous says that sexually abusing or exploiting people in developing countries is fundamentally inconsistent with the UN’s obligations to improve the human rights of citizens. “But this applies as much to employees of oil companies or accountancy firms [based in developing countries] as it does to aid workers or peacekeepers,” she says. “Often we find that private contractors are not held to account anywhere near as vigorously as are international civil servants or NGO workers. An evening spent in a bar in Abuja, Accra or Baku reveals the massive level of men buying sex from local girls, boys and women, yet men in general, never mind the UN, are subject to very little scrutiny or accountability.”

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In January 2017, UN Secretary General António Guterres established a high-level task force within the UN to identify and eradicate sexual exploitation and abuse. This was in response to the scandal in the Central African Republic in 2017 when several children were sexually abused by a French peacekeeping force that was under UN control. Since then, more cases have emerged.

One senior staff member tells me: “It is almost impossible for victims to report such incidents because they are either not believed or not adequately supported through a criminal trial, and are often stigmatised and punished by their family members and wider communities for speaking out.”

The 2017 appointment of Jane Connors, the first Victims’ Rights Advocate for the UN is a positive step. I recently visited the UN and saw Connors in action. I was told by several people involved in combatting sexual abuse that Connors is passionate about giving victims a voice, and holding perpetrators responsible. Connors has made a tangible impact in encouraging victims to come forward, and so far, has visited the Central African Republic, Haiti and South Sudan in order to train Victims’ Rights Advocates, which she describes as “the operational reflection of my policy”.

Connors has driven home the need for a victim-centred, child-sensitive and non-discriminatory approach in dealing with those who have experienced sexual violence and exploitation.

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While the UN is obviously taking abuse by its peacekeepers seriously, it seems at a loss as to how to end it. My personal view, informed by almost four decades of campaigning against sexual abuse of women and girls, is to put in place hard-hitting, no-nonsense sanctions in order to deter potential perpetrators. That means stringent, public and internal disciplinary proceedings in cases where there is any corroborating evidence, and the threat of criminal sanctions and job losses.

In his 2018 report on special measures for protection from sexual abuse, Guterres said: “I have repeatedly affirmed that sexual exploitation and abuse will not be tolerated by the United Nations.” He added: “No individual serving under the United Nations’ flag should be associated with sexual exploitation and abuse.” It is outrageous that that still needs to be said.

The extent of sexual abuse during UN missions is shocking and disturbing. The very men who are tasked with making life better for these already traumatised women are making their lives infinitely worse. The UN must be held to account for its employees’ behaviour. It must take responsibility for the fact that the vast majority of sexual assault and exploitation is by humanitarian workers in unregulated NGOs. Strong words are not enough.