The U.S. warns Chinese firms against helping Russia against potential Ukraine sanctions

February 7, 2022: -On Thursday, the United States warned Chinese firms they would face the consequences if they want to evade any export controls imposed on Moscow in the event of Russia invades Ukraine.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price remarked after China’s Foreign Ministry said China and Russia had coordinated their positions on Ukraine in a meeting amid their foreign ministers in Beijing on Thursday.

“We have an array of tools that we can deploy if we see foreign companies, which include those in China, doing their best to backfill U.S. export control actions, to evade them, to get around them,” Price told a regular news briefing.

Western countries say that any invasion of Ukraine by Russia would bring sanctions on Moscow, and Washington has said it has to impose financial sanctions and export-control measures.

On Wednesday, White House national security official Peter Harrell said that Washington was working on the export-control measures with allies in Asia, which includes Japan and South Korea.

Price said that Russia should know that a closer relationship with Beijing would not make up for the consequences of an invasion.

“If Russia thinks that it will be in a position to mitigate few of those consequences, by a closer relationship with China, that is not the case. It will make the Russian economy, in many ways, more brittle,” he said.

“If you deny yourself the ability to transact with the West, to import with the West, from Europe, from the United States, you are going to degrade your productive capacity and your innovative potential significantly,” he added.

Price said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi had an extended discussion on the potential implications of Russian action against Ukraine in a phone call in the previous week.

China’s foreign ministry said that Wang met with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and expressed “understanding and support” for Russia’s position on security regarding Russia’s relationship with the United States and NATO.

It said that each side coordinated their positions on regional issues of common concern, like Ukraine, Afghanistan, and the situation on the Korean Peninsula.

The U.N. Security Council will meet on Friday at the request of the U.S. and Britain after North Korea’s launch of an intermediate-range ballistic missile the previous weekend.

The U.S is pushing for more international sanctions on North Korea over recent missile tests. Still, in the previous month, China and Russia delayed a U.S. bid to impose U.N. sanctions on five North Koreans linked to their country’s weapons programs.