THE WASHINGTON POST • February 23, 2023

JOHANNESBURG — Clement Manyathela, who hosts a popular and influential
talk show on South Africa’s Radio 702, remembers the outrage he felt
when Russian troops first surged into Ukraine. He had believed Russia’s
insistence that it wasn’t planning to attack and felt cheated when war
broke out.

“We were lied to,” he said.

But as the fighting continued, he, and many of those who call in to his
show, began to ask questions: Why had President Vladimir Putin deemed it
necessary to invade? Was NATO fueling the fire by sending so many
weapons to Ukraine? How could the United States expect others around the
world to support its policies when it had also invaded countries?

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/africa/2023-02-22/ukraine-war-global-divide-9222379.html

“When America went into Iraq, when America went into Libya, they had
their own justifications that we didn’t believe, and now they’re trying
to turn the world against Russia. This is unacceptable, too,” Manyathela
said. “I still don’t see any justification for invading a country, but
we cannot be dictated to about the Russian moves on Ukraine. I honestly
feel the U.S. was trying to bully us.”

In the year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a reinvigorated Western
alliance has rallied against Russia, forging what President Biden has
trumpeted as a “global coalition.” Yet a closer look beyond the West
suggests the world is far from united on the issues raised by the
Ukraine war.

The conflict has exposed a deep global divide, and the limits of U.S.
influence over a rapidly shifting world order. Evidence abounds that the
effort to isolate Putin has failed, and not just among Russian allies
that could be expected to back Moscow, such as China and Iran.

India announced last week that its trade with Russia has grown by 400
percent since the invasion. In just the past six weeks, Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov has been welcomed in nine countries in Africa and
the Middle East — including South Africa, whose foreign minister, Naledi
Pandor, hailed their meeting as “wonderful” and called South Africa and
Russia “friends.”

On Friday, a year after the invasion began, the South African navy will
be engaged in military exercises with Russia and China in the Indian
Ocean, sending a powerful signal of solidarity at a moment the United
States had hoped would provide an opportunity for reinvigorated
worldwide condemnations of Russia.

Conversations with people in South Africa, Kenya and India suggest a
deeply ambivalent view of the conflict, informed less by the question of
whether Russia was wrong to invade than by current and historical
grievances against the West — over colonialism, perceptions of
arrogance, and the West’s failure to devote as many resources to solving
conflicts and human rights abuses in other parts of the world, such as
the Palestinian territories, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Western countries “are hypocritical,” said Bhaskar Dutta, a clerk in
Kolkata, India. “These people colonized the entire world. What Russia
has done cannot be condoned, but at the same time, you cannot blame them
wholly.”

U.S. officials point out that 141 of 193 countries at the United Nations
voted to condemn Russia after the invasion and that 143 voted in October
to censure the Kremlin’s announced annexation of parts of Ukraine. But
only 33 countries have imposed sanctions on Russia, and a similar number
are sending lethal aid to Ukraine. An Economist Intelligence Unit survey
last year estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population lives in
countries that have refrained from condemning Russia.

This is not a battle between freedom and dictatorship, as Biden often
suggests, said William Gumede, who founded and heads the
Johannesburg-based Democracy Works Foundation, which promotes democracy
in Africa. He pointed to the refusal of South Africa, India and Brazil
to join Biden’s global coalition.

That reluctance, he said, is the outgrowth of more than a decade of
building resentment against the United States and its allies, which have
increasingly lost interest in addressing the problems of the Global
South, he said. The coronavirus pandemic, when Western countries locked
down and locked out other countries, and President Donald Trump’s
explicit disdain for Africa, further fueled the resentment.

As the West pulled back, both Russia and China stepped into the vacuum,
aggressively courting developing nations and capitalizing on the
disillusionment with the United States and Europe by presenting an
alternative to perceived Western hegemony. The Middle East and Africa
are key battlegrounds in this struggle for hearts and minds, as are Asia
and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, whose fortunes are more closely
bound by geography to the United States.

The Middle East is one region where Russia has succeeded in winning
friends and influence, said Faysal, a retired Egyptian consultant on
organized crime who asked that his full name not be used because of the
sensitivity of discussing political issues in Egypt.

“Of course I support Putin,” he said in an interview in Cairo. “A long
time ago, we lost faith in the West. All the Arabs on this side of the
world support Putin, and we are happy to hear he is gaining lands in
Ukraine.”

“There’s been a failure of the West in the past 15 years to see the
anger building up around the world, and Russia has absolutely exploited
this,” Gumede said. “Russia has been able to portray Ukraine as a war
with NATO. It’s the West versus the rest.”

Despite Western efforts to attribute global inflation and a food crisis
to the Russian invasion, most countries around the world blame the West
for the imposition of sanctions, said Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian
foreign secretary.

They do not subscribe to the narrative that countering Russia is a moral
imperative if the principles of democracy and territorial integrity and
the rules-based world order are to be upheld, Sibal said.

“That’s not an argument that serious people buy,” he said, citing the
NATO bombing of Serbia, U.S. support for dictatorships during the Cold
War, and the Iraq War as examples of what he sees as the United States
violating those same principles.

“The rest of the world genuinely sees this as a European war. They do
not see a global conflict or the way it is presented by the West,” he
said. “Yes, it has international repercussions such as inflation. But
those repercussions are because of the sanctions.”

In refusing to risk its relationship with Russia, India is taking a
hardheaded view of its own interests, he said, including its dependence
on Russia for military supplies and the opportunity to hold inflation at
bay by buying discounted Russian oil. There are tens of thousands of
Chinese troops massed on India’s border with China, its geopolitical
rival, and India can’t afford to alienate Russia or risk any
interruption of its weapons supplies, he said.

The United States needs India to counterbalance China and, after initial
attempts to pressure New Delhi to fall into line with its policies, now
appears to have accepted India’s position, Sibal said. The United States
decided not to impose sanctions on India for a missile deal it concluded
with Russia last year and instead has been pursuing expanded ties,
including its own defense deals.

South Africa’s decision to join military exercises with Russia and China
has been met with less understanding. U.S. and Western diplomats have
expressed alarm at both the timing and the nature of the drills, saying
they suggest that South Africa is veering beyond its professed
neutrality toward siding with Russia.

South African officials have noted that the country also participated in
exercises with the U.S. military last year. But those drills were
focused on humanitarian and disaster responses, said a U.S. official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. The
Russia-China exercises, which began Friday, involve offensive naval
capabilities and could conceivably enhance Russia’s naval combat
capacity. The Russian force includes one of Moscow’s premier warships,
the Admiral Gorshkov, which Russia has said is equipped with its newly
developed hypersonic Zircon missile.

The exercises are giving Russia an important public relations boost as
the West’s attention is focused on the anniversary of the war, said
Kobus Marais, spokesman for South Africa’s Democratic Alliance
opposition party. He said South Africa had become “Russia’s useful
idiot” and could become complicit in war crimes if the Admiral Gorshkov
is later deployed to fire missiles into Ukraine.

The exercise follows the mysterious docking at a South African port in
December of a Russian ship, the Lady R, which is under U.S. sanctions
because it is known to have engaged in weapons deliveries. The cargo
ship was denied permission to dock at Cape Town, its original
destination, and instead sailed a few miles away to a smaller port at
Simon’s Town, where it was observed unloading and then reloading
containers that had apparently originated at a South African special
forces ammunition-storage site, according to Marais.