China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, meeting in Beijing and presenting themselves as potential mediators for the war in Ukraine, declared Friday that negotiation was "the only viable way out of the crisis” there.
In a joint statement, Xi and Lula avoided the words "invasion” or "war” and offered few specifics about how to bring Russia or Ukraine to the table after more than a year of war.
But Lula said he supported China’s framework for ending the war in Ukraine, which does not call for Russia to withdraw its troops. He also called for China’s territorial integrity to be respected with regards to Taiwan, a similar stance to the one President Emmanuel Macron of France took last weekend after he traveled to China to meet with Xi.