Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his support for the Chinese Communist Party in its war of words with the United States over Beijing’s slow response to the coronavirus and the origins of the pandemic.
Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke with his Russian counterpart on the phone on Thursday, and “Putin commended the Chinese government for taking effective measures to not only contain the spread of the virus at home but also contribute to safeguarding the health and safety of people across the world,” according to a readout of the call Friday by China’s Foreign Ministry.
Putin also told Xi, “China has set an example for the international community and responded, loud and clear, to the provocation and stigmatization by some country,” in a clear reference to the U.S.
Numerous high-ranking Chinese diplomats have accused the U.S. and the Army of starting the outbreak, widely believed by experts to have originated in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China. The Chinese government denies it started there.
“This disinformation campaign, which began when we began to call out this risk that was created not only for the Chinese people, but now we can see people all across the world, where the Chinese government knew about this risk, had identified it. They were the first to know, and they wasted valuable days at the front end, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to leave Wuhan to go to places like Italy that’s now suffering so badly,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week. “They tried to suppress this information … instead of trying to actually do the work to suppress the virus … and the Chinese Communist Party didn’t get it right and put countless lives at risk as a result of that.”
Pompeo insisted on calling the illness the “Wuhan coronavirus.” Trump has insisted on saying the “Chinese virus” on Twitter and in White House press briefings. Many commentators allege the terminology to be racist, though dozens of media outlets and news shows repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as some variant of the “Chinese coronavirus” or “Wuhan coronavirus” for weeks.
Xinhua News, a state-run arm of the Chinese Communist Party that was ordered to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, tweeted: “Yes, it’s RACIST…. But he’s doing it so people are talking about THAT instead of his LIES and INCOMPETENCE.” The propaganda outlet called it the “Trumpandemic.”
But there is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the existence and spread of the coronavirus, silenced doctors and whistleblowers, misled the World Health Organization, and attempted to keep independent health experts from investigating in Wuhan. One study indicated that, if the Chinese government acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s spread would have been greatly reduced worldwide.
There were 259,314 confirmed coronavirus cases around the world as of Friday evening and at least 11,286 deaths tied to the infection, according to Johns Hopkins University. There have been 81,250 confirmed cases in China and 3,253 confirmed deaths. There are 253 cases and one death so far in Russia, though it is likely much more. In the U.S., there were 17,402 cases, which have resulted in 224 deaths.
The “Russian side has praised the results, achieved by the Chinese government and the entire Chinese people, in countering of the spread of the disease,” said Russia’s TASS news agency.
According to China, “Xi expressed confidence that, under the leadership of President Putin, the Russian people will rally together and achieve new success.”
A report by the European Union’s External Action Service this week concluded that “a significant disinformation campaign by Russian state media and pro-Kremlin outlets regarding COVID-19 is ongoing,” which “is designed to exacerbate confusion, panic, and fear and to prevent people from accessing reliable information about the virus and public safety provisions.”
The leaked European report echoes Senate testimony from the head of the State Department’s anti-disinformation efforts.
“We’ve seen adversaries take advantage of a health crisis where people are terrified worldwide to try to advance their priorities,” said Lea Gabrielle, the director of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. “We have been able to assess that accounts tied to Russia, the entire ecosystem of Russian disinformation, has been engaged in the midst of this world health crisis.”
Chinese Ambassador to South Africa Lin Songtian tweeted on Monday that “more evidence suggests that the virus was not originated at the seafood market in Wuhan at all, not to mention the so called ‘made in China.'” He was quote-tweeting a missive from China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who shared an article that said: “This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the U.S.”
The WHO concluded the COVID-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan, and its investigative report in February concluded that “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source as many reported visiting or working in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.”
Assistant Secretary of State David Stilwell summoned Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai after Zhao twisted comments made by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield as evidence to support a conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is part of an American plot and gave a “stern representation” of the facts to Cui, a State Department official told the Washington Examiner.
The State Department ramped up its condemnations on Monday during a call between Pompeo and the director of the Office of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Communist Party, Yang Jiechi. “Secretary Pompeo conveyed strong U.S. objections to PRC efforts to shift blame for COVID-19 to the United States,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying also tweeted last week that the coronavirus didn’t originate in China and implied the outbreak began in the U.S.
Republican lawmakers have called on Twitter to suspend the Chinese officials for spreading disinformation.
