00:00Thanks, Kelly. Well, the Chinese foreign ministry confirmed that President Putin told President Xi on a phone call that he is willing to hold negotiations with Ukraine.
00:10The ministry added that President Xi told Putin that he backed the Russian leader resolving this issue through negotiations and that he repeated China's long-held stance that it's very important for one country to respect another country's sovereignty.
00:28Now, so far, China has been showing a lot of support for Russia, essentially refraining from calling Russia's attack on Ukraine an invasion.
00:39At the same time, recently, China has been increasingly showing a certain level of discomfort with Russia's move because, as President Xi has suggested, this move really seems to breach a core tenant of China's foreign policy, and that is non-interference in other states' sovereignty.
01:02Kelly? And we wonder, Eunice, how this discomfort China's feeling about Russia's move, how that will impact its take on Western sanctions.
01:10And we just heard from Goldman's Jeff Curry, China's not even buying a lot of physical commodities from Russia at the moment.
01:15Yeah, and it's interesting because there are some reports tonight that some of the Chinese state banks have stopped issuing a U.S. dollar-denominated letters of credit for purchases of Russian commodities.
01:31And so that really indicates some of the limits that China will go for assistance.
01:37Up until now, the signaling from China has been that it's willing to help Russia kind of navigate through some of these Western sanctions with announcements about new energy deals that were signed between President Putin and President Xi during the Winter Olympics.
01:52And then yesterday, an announcement of an announcement of an expansion of the import of Russian wheat.
01:58However, the analysts that I speak to say that even though China could do more to make things a little bit easier on Russia, for example, on the currency, making it a bit more convertible at a speedier pace in order to allow for more non-U.S. dollar-denominated trade,
02:16that China, at the end of the day, is going to do what's best for China.
02:19So it won't necessarily be making a whole lot of moves, say, for example, on the currency with so many domestic issues that the Chinese are worried about.
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