How the World Views the War in Ukraine

There is an excellent article in today’s Washington Post surveying support around the world for the war in Ukraine. The common narrative in the West is that Joe Biden has built a global coalition against Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. Biden deserves credit (in fact a lot of it) for revitalizing NATO and creating a coalition to stand up to Russian aggression. Yet as the image below clearly demonstrates, that coalition is not truly global in nature.

In fact, while the Ukraine war remains an important story in the West, it does not command the same interest in other parts of the world. As the article notes, they do not agree with Biden that the war in Ukraine represents an existential battle of democracy vs authoritarianism and the future of the global international order.

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.

Russia is seizing upon this frustration and trying to build their own anti-U.S. coalition. It’s important to note that a neutral stance on the Ukraine war is not the same as hopping on the Russian bandwagon. Russia is nevertheless courting countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa.

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.”

At the end of the day, this means Biden faces an uphill battle as he tries to build/maintain support for the war in Ukraine. That support appears stable in the West, for the moment, but there is much history to play out over the next few months.

-Bill