Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba went on a three-day visit to China last week. The most important part of this trip was Kuleba’s meeting with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, which took place not in Beijing but Guangzhou, a business and industry megalopolis. That choice of location may carry an ambiguous message (more on which below). However, there is no ambiguity about the fact that Kuleba going to China is one of those fairly frequent events in international politics where it is easy to intuit that something important is afoot but hard to figure out what exactly. Official statements tell only part of the story, and it is clear that they do not reveal the most sensitive and potentially impactful aspects of the encounter.

So, what was it all about? Let’s start with the timing: Why now? Kuleba, whose interactions with Ukraine’s Western backers seem to have fostered his habitually ungracious style, ended his visit with a guess that was both nonsensical and tactless. In a long interview with the Ukrainian TSN TV channel, he surmised that China had “matured” to the point of “such a conversation.” A diplomat actually practicing diplomacy might have said that the situation had “matured.” To make that statement about China carried more than a whiff of self-defeating smugness.

In reality, the most obvious explanation of the timing of Kuleba’s trip is also the most plausible one: Ukraine’s reaching out to China at this point is a result of its difficult, even dire military and political situation: Russia has held the initiative on the battlefield for at least half a year and is making steady progress in diminishing already badly depleted Ukrainian forces by attrition. By now, even staunchly pro-Ukrainian British newspaper The Telegraph admits that Russia is making large advances, while Kiev’s desperate mobilization drive has run into widespread resistance, and an unprecedentedly large share of Ukrainians (44% and growing) do not shy away from telling pollsters that they want peace negotiations to start.

At the same time, vital Western support for Ukraine remains extremely fragile; even with the poll bump that the US Democrats have reaped from replacing the clearly senescent current President Joe Biden as their election candidate with his vice president, Kamala Harris, a Donald Trump victory in........

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