Russian ‘invasion was wrong’: Views from China on war in the Ukraine

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Liu-wen Fang cried when she saw the first pictures of Kyiv under attack and on fire. In 2018, the 26-year-old added an exchange year in the Ukrainian capital to her business degree. There, she went to a big university to study Russian and Ukrainian.

During that year, she liked Kyiv and its people a lot. She remembers walking along the city’s winding riverbanks and going to its big parks. She also remembers having drinks with friends in the city’s charming bars and having dinner parties in homes that Russian missiles were now destroying. From her home in Shanghai, Fang* told Al Jazeera, “It was hard to see the city I had lived in become a war zone.”

Before the invasion, Fang thought a lot of President Vladimir Putin and Russia. All of that changed after the attack. “What I saw and heard from my Ukrainian friends about how Putin’s imperialistic fantasies were ruining their lives made me lose all support and respect for Russia and Putin,” she said.

Fang knows that her critical views of Russia are rare, especially in China, where news media are heavily censored, and especially when it comes to the war in Ukraine. But more than a year after the invasion, there are signs that the average Chinese person’s view of Putin and Russia’s war in Ukraine is changing.

Hsia-Liang Hou, who is 41 years old and from the province of Chengdu in central China, has recently changed his mind about Russia and Putin.

He had thought for years that Russia had a strong military and that Putin was a strong, smart leader who was willing to stand up to the West and NATO.

But after more than a year of war without a clear Russian victory, Hou said he has started to see the invasion of Ukraine as a sign of Russian weakness rather than strength.