A Russian victory in Ukraine could embolden China, the UK's defense secretary, Grant Shapps, said on Wednesday.
Shapps was calling for continued support from the West for Ukraine in an op-ed for Politico, which was published Wednesday.
"We must maintain this momentum. And we need more diplomatic, economic and military support to do so," Shapps wrote.
"There's no world in which Putin can be allowed to win," he continued. "Not only would it embolden him, putting our other Eastern European allies in Russia's crosshairs, but it would also signal to China that everything is up for grabs."
Shapps isn't the first official to have speculated about China's interest in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Former President Donald Trump said in March 2022 that China might decide to invade Taiwan sooner rather than later after seeing Russia's invasion.
"I think the Chinese leadership is trying to study the lessons of Russia's invasion of Ukraine," the CIA director, William Burns, told NBC in July 2022.
"Our sense is that it probably affects less the question of whether the Chinese leadership might choose some years down the road to use force to control Taiwan, but how and when they would do it," Burns added.
China considers the island of Taiwan to be a "renegade province" that's part of its territory. NBC reported that during last year's APEC summit, China's leader, Xi Jinping, told President Joe Biden that China intended to take over Taiwan.
"We stand firmly on the side of peace and dialogue, that is, the right side of history," Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for China's Embassy in Washington, DC, said of Shapp's op-ed in a statement to Newsweek.
"We hope all parties will work on ways for de-escalation and create the conditions for working toward a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis," Liu continued.
Representatives for China's foreign ministry didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
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