When China's foreign ministry reproduces the content of phone calls, it often deviates from what the interlocutors actually said.

It seemed so on Tuesday evening after Foreign Minister Wang Yi spoke on the phone with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba.

Beijing said Kuleba said Ukraine was hoping for "China's efforts to mediate a ceasefire."

However, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry said Kuleba had urged China to use its influence over Moscow to stop the Russian invasion.

It's just one example of the verbal acrobatics Beijing is currently using to present itself as a peacemaker without relinquishing its support for the aggressor Russia.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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China continues to refuse to condemn or even name the invasion.

It rejects sanctions against Russia and adopts Moscow's central narrative: the cause of the war is NATO expansion.

Russia's "legitimate" security needs must be respected.

The Russian army is attacking "installations" with "high-precision weapons".

Verbal backdoors

However, in the past few days there have been several rhetorical adjustments and gradual changes in reporting by the state media.

China may have been counting on a quick end to a "lightning war" and now faces the prospect of a long war with many civilian casualties.

Verbal backdoors are now being opened to limit the damage to China's reputation as a self-proclaimed "responsible great power."

From Beijing's point of view, it was necessary to balance three mutually incompatible goals: maintaining the strategic partnership with Russia, limiting consequential damage to economic relations with Europe and the USA, and upholding the principle of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states.

China was the first to reveal the latter,

In the phone call with Ukraine's foreign minister, Wang Yi expressed his "deeply concern" at the suffering of civilians and the humanitarian situation.

The focus of the phone call, however, was China's concern for the safety of its own citizens.

The minister called on Kyiv to "assume its international responsibilities" and "take all necessary steps to enable the safety of Chinese citizens."

He did not say a word about Russia's responsibility.

On Tuesday, state television reported on a Chinese man who had been wounded by a bullet while fleeing to Lemberg.

It was not discussed which of the warring parties shot at him.

The presence of around 6,000 students, business people and other Chinese in Ukraine is politically sensitive for Beijing.

On the one hand, unlike many Western countries, China failed to call on its citizens to leave the country in good time and instead accused America of inciting the danger of war.

On the other hand, some of their statements question the official narrative.

On Tuesday, a desperate student in Kyiv posted a recording of a phone call with a Chinese embassy employee on the Internet.

"You keep telling us to get ourselves to safety.

Where are all the people who say every day on Weibo, your country always stands by you?

Such statements are understandable given the life-threatening situation in Ukraine.

But in China, the woman faced accusations that she was slandering her motherland and supplying ammunition to China's enemies.

The recording was deleted by the censors.

On Wednesday, the woman wrote that she had been taken to safety on a special train.