Chinese state media commentaries blamed the US for the war in Ukraine this week, with prominent coverage claiming Washington was seeking to gain from the conflict.
“The US ambition to profit from the Ukraine situation has been made abundantly clear,” said one newscaster on state broadcaster China Central Television, in a segment that claimed the US would benefit from rising prices for US oil resulting from western sanctions against Russia.
The broadcast also claimed the US would benefit from the construction of new infrastructure to transport liquified natural gas in Europe as countries grow wary of the Russian pipelines that supply much of the continent.
Another segment highlighted Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s comments that US seizures of Russian diplomatic properties in the country were “daylight robbery”, while CCTV2 hosted a 21-minute discussion on whether energy had become “the second battlefield” between Russia and the west.
Coverage in state newspapers focused on the potential political benefits to the US from the conflict, with a prominent editorial in the Communist party-run People’s Daily arguing that the conflict allowed Washington to use Nato as a “tool for the United States to practise its hegemony”.
A series of opinion pieces in the military-owned PLA Daily blamed the US for the war. One article again highlighted the unsubstantiated claim that the US was using Ukraine to develop bio-weapons. Originally pushed by Moscow, the claim has since been embraced by both official and popular media in China.
Xinhua, the official state news agency, ran an interview with Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, who told them it was “absolutely necessary” to run checks on US biolabs in Ukraine.
Popular media outlets and social media were even more hawkish, painting the war in Ukraine as Russia’s stand against western hegemony and often noting that if Russia falls, only China will remain.
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