The countries of the global south, where two-thirds of humanity live, do not support Ukraine. No, at least expressly. Most voted in favor of the United Nations resolutions against the Russian invasion and expressed solidarity with the Ukrainian people, but almost none were in favor of economic sanctions or suspending Russia from the Human Rights Council.
The moral arguments put forward by the United States and the European Union to help Ukraine have little scope south of the equator, and the same is true of the geopolitical arguments. The idea that it is a fight of democracies against authoritarianism is dismantled by itself when, for example, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, appears, bumping fists with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salmán, in Jeddah. The meeting was on July 15, three years after, in the middle of the electoral campaign, Biden said that Bin Salmán was a pariah.
Above moral and personal assessments are, however, economic reasons. The United States needs Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to lower the price of a barrel. China and Russia also have an important and growing weight in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. China provides infrastructure and financial resources. Russia, energy, food and fertilizers, as well as security in some of the countries in these regions.
Then double standards come into play. "The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 under false pretexts," recalls Professor Amitav Acharya of the American University in Washington DC. “It was an unprovoked aggression from Iraq. How many Western countries then put sanctions on the US?” asked this specialist from the global south last Monday at the CIDOB headquarters.
Sovereignty, territorial integrity, is basic for the countries of the South. That is why they condemn the invasion. But, immediately afterwards, they talk about the interventions of the US and its allies in Libya and Afghanistan and highlight the double standards of two important friends of the United States: Israel colonizes Palestine and Morocco does not respect the right to self-determination of the Sahara.
“The global south -adds Acharya- is broad and diverse. We used to call it the Third World. Each country has its own agenda, but if there is one thing that unites them, it is the memory of the cold war, of the coercive power of the United States. Being pawns in conflicts that they do not control does not bring them any benefit.”
“Asian, African and Latin American countries -Acharya explains- do not see Russia as an existential threat. The same thing happens to the European Union with China. That is why the EU seeks a dialogue with China that the US does not quite understand, while the global south asks for an understanding with Russia”.
Macky Sal, president of Senegal and of the African Union, met on June 3 with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, where he assured that "we work for dialogue and we want peace". The Russian president thanked him for the visit and recalled the long diplomatic tradition of Russia and the Soviet Union in Africa.
The USSR defended the decolonization of the African peoples and had an important weight in many governments and leftist movements. The militia of the African National Congress, for example, trained in the Soviet Odessa - now Ukrainian - to overthrow the racist South African government. The Kremlin was staunchly opposed to apartheid long before Western countries.
The USSR exploited anti-imperialism during the cold war, and Putin does the same now. The paradox that the invasion of the Ukraine is a step to recover the former Soviet empire dissolves in the acid of Russian propaganda. Information spaces in the global south, as a study by the Brookings Institution shows, are being bombarded by Russian disinformation.
Anti-imperialism, likewise, continues to have an important weight in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the regimes that yielded to the United States are in retreat. China and Russia, without being friends, seem more solvent allies. They demonstrate it, at least, in the votes in the United Nations and other international organizations, where they do not always have the support of the United States.
The resolution approved by the UN General Assembly condemning the Russian invasion was supported by 28 of the 34 countries of the Organization of American States, but only one - Bahamas - supports sanctions.
Latin American countries - like many others in the global south - do not believe that sanctions are a tool in favor of justice, but of the hegemony of the United States. Cuba and Venezuela are two examples. The sanctions against them seek a regime change that favors Washington's interests while causing serious harm to ordinary Cubans and Venezuelans.
Brazil and Mexico, the two main Latin American economies, are also closer to Moscow than to Washington in the Ukraine conflict.
A few days before the invasion, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro went to Moscow to express his solidarity with Putin. Weeks later, with Russian troops on Ukrainian soil, Lula da Silva, the favorite to unseat him, claimed that the war was the fault of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Both criticize the sanctions because they disproportionately affect countries in the South.
The same thinks the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He claims that Mexico is neutral, but opposes sanctions and criticizes the United States and the EU for sending weapons to Ukraine. He believes that Washington would make better use of the money by investing it in Mexico and Central America. Several deputies from his party, also with the support of other political forces, including the PRI, have formed a parliamentary committee for Mexican-Russian friendship.
The neutrality of Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, India, Indonesia and other countries of the global south responds to unresolved grievances in history. The development aid programs of the US and the EU have not yet compensated for the decades of subjugation and indifference of the North towards the South.
Ukraine exposes this unequal treatment and gives wings to a new multipolar order, just what China, Russia and most of the global south demand.
Small countries in population and economy also have an overview of the world. They possess a physical, moral and political power that the North, as Sukarno pointed out in 1955, has not yet known how to value. The then president of Indonesia chaired the first Afro-Asian meeting of the cold war that year. He was the seed of the Non-Aligned Movement, which came to fruition in Belgrade in 1961 under the leadership of India, Egypt, Ghana and Yugoslavia.
These countries - like those that are not now fully aligned with Ukraine - were not advocating abstention or neutrality, but rather a more horizontal and cross-cultural world. They were closer to the USSR than to the US They sought decolonization and economic justice.
The movement lost its meaning after the victory of the United States in the cold war. Liberal democracies only really looked at the South again in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York. They were more of a threat than an opportunity.
Ukraine has not revived the Non-Aligned, but the substratum that propelled them is still alive, proof that the international order, as we have known it since the collapse of the USSR, is coming to an end.
One only has to follow the activity of the UN General Assembly to realize this. Although the Security Council meets almost every week to discuss the war in Ukraine, the General Assembly has lost its inhibitions. Kiyv's allies fear that any resolution they propose today will not be supported by previous ones. It would run the risk of not reaching the majority.
As Professor Acharya maintains, economic interdependence will eventually prevail. It is common sense.
But, meanwhile, the South feels insecure and covers its back with those who protect it the most. China and Russia seem to be more of a guarantee than the US.
