One belt, one Donbas: China is gaining a foothold in Russian-occupied Ukraine

Chinese investors’ interest in doing business in Crimea emerged even before Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014. In December 2013, the Ukrainian government signed a memorandum on economic cooperation with a Chinese canal building company belonging to multimillionaire Wang Jing. The firm is known for its ambitious plan to build a shipping canal in Nicaragua that was meant to compete with the Panama Canal — and to advance China’s geopolitical interests.

The Ukrainian-Chinese project envisioned construction of a deepwater port in Crimea and Chinese participation in the reconstruction of the fishing port in Sevastopol. The first phase of investment was to total $3 billion. Wang Jing, owner of Beijing Interoceanic Canal Investment Management Co. Ltd., said that the project would turn Crimea into “an economic and transport hub of the Maritime Silk Road.”

Even then, some Ukrainian experts believed this was the first step in a large-scale Chinese plan for expansion: first a port in Crimea, then leases of agricultural land in Ukraine’s south, ending with the country becoming an agricultural appendage of China. Crimean environmentalists also opposed the project, but at the time, the Maidan protest movement had already begun, and President Viktor Yanukovych needed to attract money to Ukraine from any source still willing to invest.