How can Ukraine rebuild China ties scarred by Russia’s war?

Kyiv, Ukraine – Back in the 1990s, China’s nascent capitalism triggered demand for Ukrainian steel slabs and iron ore, corn and sunflower oil.

However, the most prized export items from impoverished Ukraine were the Soviet-era arsenal of weapons it did not think it needed any more.

Kyiv sold Beijing aerospace components, helicopter and tank engines, and technology transfers for the manufacturing of radars, naval gas turbines and jet engines, helping to reshape China’s defence industry.

It even admitted to illegally shipping six nuclear-capable Kh-55 cruise missiles.

The pinnacle of military-industrial exports was the 1998 sale of the Soviet-era Varyag aircraft carrier, whose construction began but never finished on the wharves of the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv.

Beijing pledged to use the 306-metre (1,004-foot) long vessel for training but turned it into its first aircraft carrier, Liaoning.

The tables have turned during the Russia-Ukraine war, when China became the side that profits the most from the fierce competition between Russian and Ukrainian drone developers.

It is “always” a Chinese manufacturer of unmanned aircraft “who earns the most”, Andrey Pronin, one of the drone warfare pioneers in Ukraine, told media.

He was standing in the storeroom of his school for drone pilots on the outskirts of Kyiv – next to a dozen drones that ranged from what looked like a tiny replica of a World War I biplane to a jet-driven mini-missile to tiny first-person-view drones.