Ukraine’s actual debt obligations to China are significantly smaller — approximately $830 million as of June 2024. No diplomatic approach by Zelensky to Beijing requesting a deferral, as claimed by the propagandists, has been recorded either.
Russian propaganda outlets and anonymous Telegram channels are claiming that China refused Ukraine a deferral on debt repayment amounting to $30.8 billion. The authors of these posts cite the “Chinese media Sohu” as their primary source but provide no direct link to the article.
According to these publications, President Volodymyr Zelensky allegedly approached the Chinese side through a diplomatic representative with a request to postpone the payment, and in case of refusal — threatened to create problems on issues related to the Taiwan Strait and North Korea. In Beijing, the propagandists claim, such actions were interpreted as a sign of panic, and it was made clear that the debt obligations must be fulfilled in full.
Yet he information spread in these publications is fake, as indicated by numerous factors.
First, the “Chinese news outlet Sohu” (sohu.com), as Russian media called it, is not an editorially controlled media organization similar to the BBC or Reuters but a Chinese digital conglomerate comparable in scale to Google’s suite of services. The platform encompasses internet search, video hosting, online gaming, and a news aggregator. The latter operates on a blogosphere model: any user can register an account on Sohu and publish content there without prior fact-checking or editorial verification. For this reason, every article on the platform is accompanied by an automatic disclaimer: “The views expressed in this article represent solely the personal opinion of the author. Sohu is an information publishing platform that provides only data storage services.” It was precisely in this section — among posts by anonymous users and blogs — that the StopFake team managed to locate the original source of the story being circulated as official information.
On April 23rd, an anonymous blog called the Bureau of Global Investigations and Secrets (全球探秘局) on the Sohu platform published an article headlined Ukraine’s Financial Collapse: Zelensky Cornered — China Reveals Its Hand on $30.8 Billion Debt and Has No Intention of Backing Down. The article claims that President Zelensky allegedly made an urgent approach to China requesting a deferral or write-off of a $30.8 billion debt, citing the critical state of public finances, and threatened complications regarding the Taiwan Strait and North Korea in case of refusal. The author asserts that China categorically rejected any concessions, insisting on full and timely repayment. At no point in the text is it specified what debt is actually being referred to, under which agreement it arose, when the repayment deadline falls, or whether a specific payment date even exists — the figure of $30.8 billion is presented as self-evident fact, without any documentary basis. The entire article is written in the tone of a personal commentary and is presented solely in the author’s own voice: it contains no references to credible sources, official statements from the Chinese or Ukrainian governments, diplomatic documents, or verified media outlets.
An additional check via Google search and monitoring of credible international and Ukrainian sources also yielded no results corroborating the claimed information. No credible media outlet — Ukrainian, Chinese, or Western — has reported on a debt of $30.8 billion, a diplomatic approach by Zelensky to Beijing requesting a deferral, or a refusal by the Chinese side.
What are Ukraine’s actual debt obligations to China? According to research by Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Holovko, the primary and most pressing debt is the loan taken out by the State Food and Grain Corporation of Ukraine (SFGCU) — a $1.5 billion loan obtained under state guarantees back in 2012 from the Export-Import Bank of China. A significant portion of these funds was embezzled by the Yanukovych government in 2012–2013, and the contractual terms regarding grain supplies to China were never fulfilled. As of late 2021, the outstanding principal balance stood at $900 million, and in January 2022, the Finance Ministry of Ukraine was forced to pay of 2.5 billion hryvnias due to the corporation’s insolvency. These figures are corroborated by an independent source: in June 2024, Reuters reported that according to data from the Ukrainian Finance Ministry, the debt owed to the Chinese Exim Bank stood at approximately $830 million. The claim that China refused Ukraine a deferral on a debt of $30.8 billion is therefore false. Moreover, the made up figure is nearly 1.5 times greater than even the record annual trade turnover between the two countries in 2021, which amounted to $18.9 billion. For comparison, all accumulated direct investments from mainland China and Hong Kong into Ukraine at that time totaled only $380.5 million.
The StopFake team also sought comment from Yuriy Poita, head of the Asia-Pacific section at the New Geopolitics Research Network think tank — who also recommended Volodymyr Holovko’s research. The expert confirmed that the figures associated with Ukraine’s known credit obligations to China are significantly smaller than the number featured in the fake story and bear no relation to the $30.8 billion declared in the publication.
It is quite possible that the fake was inspired by a real but fundamentally different dispute — the Motor Sich case. The company was nationalized in 2021 after Ukrainian authorities suspected that Chinese investors, led by the company Skyrizon, were seeking to transfer aero-engine manufacturing technology to Russia. In response, Skyrizon filed a claim against Ukraine with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague for $4.5 billion — which amounts to approximately 30.8 billion Chinese yuan. It appears that the authors of the disinformation simply confused the currencies, inflating the figure nearly sevenfold. The case is still pending; no ruling has yet been issued. Moreover, the claimant is not the Chinese state but a private company — meaning this is an investor-state arbitration dispute that has no bearing on intergovernmental debt obligations.
The topic of Ukraine’s debt obligations is one of the favorite subjects of Russian propagandists. StopFake has previously addressed similar fakes in the articles Fake: Poland Will Be Paying Off Ukraine’s Debts Until 2068 and Fake: Ukraine’s National Debt Will Soon Exceed 1000% of the Country’s GDP.
