Stop the war: Begged not to start the war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin went ahead to break a decade-long global taboo of bigger nations invading their smaller counterparts.
The drama around the 17 South Africans who have been lured by Russia to fight in its bloody and barbaric war against Ukraine is an eye-opener in many ways. For once, it came as an illustration of how Russia’s evil war of conquest destroys lives not only in Ukraine but also in the so-called “Global South”.
It takes true evil to send unwitting, unprepared young men, complete strangers to the whole Ukraine-Russia context, into Europe’s worst meat grinder since World War Two.
Yes, it is a meat grinder. Every month, Russia loses in this war more militarily than the Soviet Union lost in 10 years of Afghanistan. Yet, with the fourth anniversary of the full-blown invasion approaching – it has not fully occupied a single one of Ukraine’s 24 oblasts. If a nation is so comfortably numb to so many of its own people dying for so little, why would it care about the lives of Africans?
Russia’s mind-boggling neglect to human life is not the only revelation here. It also gives us a taste of a world it is trying to create for the 21st century. No, it is not a “resurgence against the collective West” or an attempt to make the world fair. It is rather an attempt to make it unfair differently, with more cruelty, a bigger slice of the global pie and an imperial status for Russia. It is what Russia’s leading ideologue Aleksandr Dugin calls “the era of new empires”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin explained his reasons bluntly enough in his 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson. For him, this war is about grabbing what he considers “historically Russian lands” and giving his people the delusion of “greatness”. Other goals (like the humiliation of the West) are only the extension of the primary one: occupying Ukraine and finally reinstating Russia’s imperial status. Seeing many in the Global South rejoice or even root for the rise of an empire that embodies the worst habits of the past is astounding, to say the least.
Russia opens a door to new old imperialism. Not the economic one. Not the cultural one. Not the creeping one. A marching one. A proud one. A kind of imperialism that literally invades your home and says: from now on, what used to be yours is mine.
For the Global South, it must ring a bell. Yet strangely, many nations that have been through this experience in the past, do not recognise their own pain in Ukraine’s suffering. Which only partly goes on the account of Russia being good at fooling people. The rest is on account of people wanting to be fooled.
When the full-blown invasion of 2022 happened, everything in Russia’s actions was proud, demonstrative, “in your face” – the cruelty, the deception, the imperial hubris towards “the peasants” in Ukraine. Seeing Russia get ready for a huge war, world leaders spent the year 2021 traveling to Moscow and pleading with Putin not to start it. He responded with ultimatums. Soon afterward the world witnessed Russia invade Ukraine – arrogantly, cheerfully, confident that it would fall within weeks.
Yet when it turned out that “peasants” could fight back, Russia was faced with a new task: to make the world forget who attacked whom and who begged not to start this insanity. Sadly, it largely worked, for the same reason: people want to be fooled; they easily forget what they saw if what they saw does not sit well with their preconceived notions about “anti-imperial Russia”.
Therefore, it needs to be said again: in 2014 and 2022, a big nation that proudly sees itself as an empire (just listen to what Putin says for domestic consumption and not for his charm offensives in the Global South) invaded a smaller one. It not only violated multiple international treaties and basic principles of international law but also broke a decade-long global taboo of not annexing your neighbour’s land. With one strike, it created a world where, like centuries ago, it is okay for bigger nations to carve up smaller ones. And the “smaller ones” put up with this.
Look how persistently dozens of nations refuse to condemn the blatant violation of what just recently seemed inviolable.
Annexed: The devastation wrought by Russia’s nearly four years in
Ukraine is littered in the streets of Bucha, among others.
For instance, how cowardly many abstained and left the premises of the United Nations when last week it voted on the return of nearly 20 000 Ukrainian children taken away by Russia.
Welcome to a shameless dark reality where it is okay not only to start an aggression against a sovereign nation but also to loot its children as if they were washing machines.
I am deeply and wholeheartedly thankful to South Africa for doing the right thing and voting Yes.
And I am stunned about the majority of African nations being numb, abstaining. I ask myself: why would anyone (especially in countries with colonial trauma) put up with a world that proudly drags into the 21st century the worst habits of the 20th that seemed abandoned after the two world wars. And since “what goes around comes around” – isn’t it obvious that it paves the way to the third one?
Dr Olexander Scherba is the Ambassador of Ukraine to South Africa