Ukraine war exposes splits between Global North and South

When Kavita Krishnan, an activist and feminist, quit her top posts in the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation last year due to differences over the war in Ukraine, it promptly made the news in the national press.

Krishnan, 50, was in the party’s central committee and was secretary of its women’s organisation, the All India Progressive Women’s Association, for over two decades. An author and outspoken women’s rights activist, she’s a familiar face in the media and even featured on the BBC’s 2014 100 Women list.

So, when she announced her resignation in September in a Facebook post due to “troubling political questions”, it was duly noted in the news reports. Her recent social media posts on the Ukraine war were mentioned, but they were not examined in detail.

Shortly after Russia invaded a neighbouring sovereign state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government adopted a policy of studied neutrality. As India abstained from the first UN vote demanding an end to the Russian offensive – and kept up the pattern in successive votes – the Indian media largely fell in line with the official position.

The consensus, Krishnan noted, extended from right-wing Modi supporters to leftist opponents of his government’s Hindu supremacist policies.

As Russian troops advanced on several fronts in the early stages of the war, the national news focused on Indian students trapped in Ukraine, reducing a war threatening the international system to a very local story. Commentators adopted Kremlin talking points of Russia being “wronged” by NATO. It fit neatly with the anti-Western hegemony discourse popular in Indian right-wing and leftist circles. The war in Ukraine, in Indian public opinion, was “Europe’s problem”. India, it was widely accepted, must look out for its own interests.

Krishnan though had been on another intellectual journey. Over the past few years, the feminist activist had been reading up on Ukrainian history, particularly its past under the Soviet yoke, including the Great Famine – also called the Holodomor – caused by Joseph Stalin’s policies.

“I was less ready to accept the usual explanations by the Left – and even by progressives,” she said in a phone interview from New Delhi. “I genuinely believed there was a gap of information in my organisation. I tried, for a very long time, to fill that gap. I faced resistance on many fronts. The first was an unwillingness to give up on the idea that this was Ukraine resisting Russia, not ‘the West vs the Rest’.” 

Another factor, she explained, was a lack of historical awareness. “Ukraine suffered as much under Stalin as under Hitler. Without that understanding of history, one can’t understand why Ukraine is fighting now,” she maintained.

Her resignation was long brewing, but it did not make her decision any easier. “It was very lonely. I was in this organisation nearly 30 years, I really didn’t want to break with them,” she explained. “I was trying to explore why the Global South was getting so much so wrong. They didn’t want me to do that.”

The Ukraine war has been a moment of reckoning for the international community. One year after the Russian invasion, a tectonic chasm appears to have split the Global North from the Global South. Confronted with the sort of aggression and territorial expansionism that the postwar world order was designed to avert, the Western alliance, also called the Global North, has overcome competition and rivalries to maintain unity.

More than 70 years after the end of World War II, several countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America that were “emerging” for decades have essentially emerged on the world stage. The terminology for this group of nations has also kept apace, evolving from “less developed countries (ldcs)” to “developing” to the more acceptable “Global South”.

But what this collective stands for, and is willing to defend on the international stage, is more murky. And that could spell trouble not just for global peace and stability, but also for the collective aspirations and ideals of most of the world’s population.

UN abstentions, military drills and Moscow visits

The division between the positions of the Global North and South became evident during the very first UN vote on the Ukraine war.

On March 2, 2022, when the UN General Assembly gathered at a special emergency session to vote on a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion, the 35 abstentions included some of the leading members of the Global South, such as China, India, South Africa and Senegal. Some countries – including Morocco, Venezuela and Ethiopia – were simply not in the room to cast a vote, abstaining even from an abstention. With many African, Asian and Latin American countries having historic ties to Moscow, they were unwilling to pick a side.

The resolution was nevertheless adopted with a resounding 141 countries voting in favour.

By April 7, 2022, when the General Assembly gathered to vote on a resolution to kick Russia out of the UN Human Rights Council, international unity on Moscow’s actions had weakened. This was despite the evidence emerging of a Russian massacre of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

The abstentions this time rose from 35 to 58, and they included Brazil. With that, all the countries of the BRICS bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa cast their lot with a fellow member, the prime belligerent.

As experts in think tanks published papers questioning whether the West is losing the Global South, the optics was already pointing to a lost cause – even among recipients of generous Western aid.

When the war broke out on February 24, 2022, then-Pakistani leader Imran Khan was in the Kremlin, meeting President Vladimir Putin despite US warnings on a Russian border mobilisation. When the troops did cross into Ukraine, Khan declared it an “exciting time” to be in Moscow.

As the world marks the first anniversary of the war, South Africa is holding joint military exercises with Russia and China. The drills – called Mosi, which means “smoke” in Tswana, a South African language – run from February 17-27 off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal, sending a powerful message on Pretoria’s proclaimed neutrality.

Not so neutral after all

Twelve months after the start of the Ukraine war, experts say the “neutrality” argument espoused in several Global South capitals has proved to be in favour of Russia.

“In economic terms, Russia is benefitting from the politics decided in New Delhi and Riyadh,” said Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria and a special advisor to the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.

On October 5, as Europe braced for a chilly, costly winter without Russian fossil fuels, Saudi Arabia joined fellow OPEC members in slashing oil production, pushing up energy prices in Moscow’s favour. The decision came despite a controversial visit by US President Joe Biden to the oil-rich kingdom to try to convince Saudi Arabia to increase oil production.

“This enabled some of the Global South’s biggest oil importers to buy ever-cheaper Russian crude. This in turn has helped Russia finance its costly military adventures in Ukraine,” explained Duclos.

With Russia slashing its oil and gas prices, some of the biggest beneficiaries have been the biggest Global South nations. China imported record levels of Russian oil since the war began and India did likewise, importing a whopping 33 times more in December than a year earlier.

Semantics and diplomatic dodges

The term “Global South” has been much debated, but is widely deployed despite its geographic inaccuracies – Australia and New Zealand, for instance are firmly in the Global North. The UN’s Finance Center for South-South Cooperation lists 78 countries, but at times qualifies them as a “group of 77 and China”.

“When we say Global South, it’s a label that sparks debate and contestations. My own position is, it’s better to accept terminology that people themselves use. If we want to discuss and engage with them, let’s not deprive them of the vocabulary they want,” noted Duclos.

“Having said that, inside the Global South, there are some countries that are much more important than others,” continued Duclos. “These countries count more and have reached a level of economic might, which means the West is not in a position anymore to exert pressure.”

The inclusion of middle powers in the Global South family can at times see an artful dodging of responsibility on the international stage.

At the November 2022 COP27 climate summit for instance, some of the world’s biggest current carbon emitters, such as China, India and Brazil, were let off the hook when, as developing nations, they were not required to contribute to a climate change loss and development fund. The fund was hailed as a “breakthrough”, despite the conference’s failure to reach a deal on the vital 1.5 degrees global heating target.

And we’re living in a multipolar world

While some Global South countries are more equal than others, what binds this diverse group together is the quest for a “multipolar” world order stacked against the “unipolar hegemony” of the West.

It also happens to be Russia’s favourite talking point, which has turned louder as Moscow attempts to justify a clear breach of international law.

Weeks before he ordered an invasion of Ukraine, Putin was in China for the 2022 Winter Olympics, just in time to issue a joint statement with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on the need to “advance multipolarity”.

Russia and China are both permanent UN Security Council members and have successfully blocked more than a dozen resolutions on Syria. The three Western permanent members – France, the US and UK – all support the inclusion of India and a permanent African representation on the Security Council.

But these facts tend to get overlooked in Asian and African capitals, when Russian officials rail against “Western hegemony”.

Since the Ukraine war began, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has kept up a frenetic diplomatic charm offensive, visiting India, China and several African countries, including South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mali and Sudan. At news conferences from Pretoria to Khartoum, he never fails to mention the “creation of a multipolar world order”.

Multipolarity or multi-imperialisms?

The Russian argument has failed to convince Krishnan. Months after she quit her posts over the Ukraine war, the political activist published a critique in a leading online magazine on the multipolarity discourse, which she noted had turned into “a rallying cry for despots, that serves to dress up their war on democracy as a war on imperialism”.

As a lifelong leftist activist, Krishnan is not blind to the historical and contemporary wrongs committed by Western countries, including colonialism, imperialism, invasions and occupations. But she warns against a multipolarity of regional tyrants cracking down on the opposition, minorities, free speech and other liberal democratic values.

“Ukraine isn’t a ‘pole’. In South Asia, India is the emerging ‘pole’, not Nepal or Bangladesh,” she explained. “Multipolarity has always meant multi-imperialism, now it means multi-despotism, where each despot is free to be despotic.”

She also rejects arguments that the Global South’s “neutrality” on the Ukraine war is an extension of the Cold War-era Non-Alignment Movement, which saw primarily postcolonial nations refusing to be officially aligned with either the US or the USSR.

“Multipolarity is very different from non-alignment, which was in theory based on noble ideas, not on pragmatic, amoral self-interest,” she explained.

Re-engaging and changing the narrative

The Ukraine war may mark a turning point in the West’s relationship with the majority of the world’s population in the Global South. But it did not just happen in February 2022, it’s been slowly in the making, according to Duclos. The conflict in eastern Europe has simply brought it to light.

“For me, the lessons of this current crisis is that the Global North and Global South are not living anymore in the same conceived world,” said Duclos. “There’s a competition of influence. We have to work against the Russian narrative and Chinese influence, which is important to the Global South because of trade and economic interests,” he noted.

The West has now been caught napping while powerful Global South countries refused to weigh in on a series of Russian infringements, from the 2014 annexation of Crimea to the 2008 war in Georgia. But the time has come, Duclos believes, for the Global North to tackle the issue head-on.

“There’s now a window of opportunity for the West to rebuild the kind of order that respects the basic tenets of the international system and individual rights with at least some members of the Global South,” he maintained. “Right now, a lot of these countries have illiberal governments and the people are suffering from it.”

Increasing the people’s understanding of issues is now Krishnan’s main mission since she quit her political party.

A year after the war began and Krishnan was forced to confront the “loneliness” of her positions, she says she’s having some success in getting her message across.

Her essay, “Multipolarity, the Mantra of Authoritarianism”, has now been widely republished and distributed. It’s also been translated in a number of Indian languages and the responses have been overwhelming.

In the lead-up to the anniversary of the Russian invasion, Krishnan got a call from a woman in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv who is translating her essay into Ukrainian.

“It filled me with humility and joy to hear that a woman sitting in Kharkiv was translating what I wrote. I’m happy with the relationships I am building across the world with people who want a better, more egalitarian world,” she said. “I’m busy telling my friends in India that our coloniser was from across the sea. In Ukraine, Moscow was just as colonial, expropriating grain and starving the people. Ukrainians are trying to stop itself from being recolonised and they must be supported.”