Joe Biden spoke for nearly two hours with Xi Jinping as the US sought to dissuade China from backing Russia’s war on Ukraine.

A White House account of the call on Friday said that the US president “described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians”.

A senior administration official said there would be consequences “not just for China’s relationship with the United States, but for the wider world”, but would not give more details on whether Biden had gone into specifics on possible sanctions, other than to point out what had happened to Russia as an example.

“The president really laid out in a lot of detail the unified response from not only governments around the world, but also the private sector to Russia’s brutal aggression in Ukraine,” the official said. “The president made clear that there would likely be consequences for those who would step in to support Russia at this time.”

Biden did not make any direct requests to Xi to persuade Putin to end the attack.

“The president really wasn’t making specific requests of China. He was laying out his assessment of the situation … and the implications of certain actions,” the official said. “Our view is that China will make its own decisions.”

The Chinese account of the conversation in the state news agency, Xinhua, said it was “candid and in-depth” but gave little detail about Ukraine. The report said that Xi expressed the wish that the war was not happening, but gave no sign of what the Chinese leader’s intentions were towards support for Moscow.

Xi said the situation in Ukraine had developed to such a point “that China does not want to see” according to the report, which stuck to Beijing’s policy of avoiding the words “war” or “invasion”.

Beijing’s readout of the call did not suggest any Chinese role in ending the war. It quoted Xi as referring to a favourite aphorism, “Let he who tied the bell on the tiger’s neck take it off”, a seeming reference to China’s position that the US and Nato are ultimately to blame for Vladimir Putin’s actions.