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Kremlin's liberation script continues to fool Third World

BY YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
Wall Street Journal

A giant sign daubed on the side of a former village school that became a Russian military encampment in eastern Ukraine spells out what many of the Russian soldiers are fighting for.

“For Putin,” the block letters say, “For Empire.”

In what can be seen as the 21st century’s first war of colonial conquest, Russia has already seized and declared as its own almost one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory. Russian leaders keep saying that the Ukrainian state itself is illegitimate and that the very notion of Ukraine’s separate identity should be eliminated.

Countries that once experienced similar brutality should have been at the forefront of opposing Russia’s aggression, many Ukrainians and their supporters say. Yet, when the United Nations General Assembly gathered this month and overwhelmingly condemned Russia’s latest land grab, most of the holdouts turned out to be nations that were once colonized themselves and that usually revel in anti-colonial rhetoric.

Only Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Nicaragua openly supported Russia, but 19 out of the 35 countries that abstained on the U.N. resolution were African, including regional heavyweights South Africa, Ethiopia and Algeria. Archrivals India and Pakistan have found unusual agreement in declining to condemn Moscow’s war. The other abstentions came from China, from former Soviet republics dependent on Moscow and from longtime partners like Cuba and Vietnam.

Tolerance for Russia’s actions across the developing world stems from a historical resentment of the West that now taints the Ukrainian cause by association, as well as from a practical need to remain on Moscow’s good side and an often genuine lack of understanding of the conflict’s nature.

“Many of these countries have a negative view of the entire collective West, while Russia has long presented itself as a country that helps liberate from the colonial yoke, that helps Africa,” said Zhan Beleniuk, who became the first black member of Ukraine’s parliament in 2019, representing President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party, and recently visited Rwanda and South Africa as part of Kyiv’s outreach.

“That is why we have to highlight our own parallels with them,” Mr. Beleniuk added. “When I came to South Africa, I told them that I thought that they should be the first country to support us in the fight for freedom because of how hard the South Africans have struggled for their own freedom.”

Yet a different narrative usually prevails—one that denies Ukrainians any agency of their own and places the conflict in the familiar framework of a confrontation between Moscow and a domineering West.

Pakistan, which went all-out to support the resistance when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, has remained noncommittal on Ukraine even after Prime Minister Imran Khan, who visited Moscow on the day of the invasion and declared himself to be “excited” by the day’s events, was replaced by Prime Minis- ter Shehbaz Sharif.

“There is empathy for the people of Ukraine because they are battling a foreign power that has invaded and occupied parts of their territory. But in the larger geopolitical context this is essentially seen as some sort of emerging Cold War pattern that is not just Russia versus Ukraine. There is a broader aspect to it, especially when NATO is involved,” said Mushahid Hussain, head of the Pakistani Senate’s defense committee. “And that is why you see many countries in the global South taking a slightly standoffish position, a position that we don’t want to get embroiled in this emerging Cold War.”

If the war in Ukraine—where no NATO soldiers are actually present on the ground—is framed in this context, the roles reverse. Moscow turns from Goliath to David: A giant military power that has in fact launched an unprovoked attack against its much smaller and weaker neighbor becomes an underdog fighting off Western encroachment. That is the worldview that Russian propaganda amplifies across the global South, with considerable success.

“You would think from reading some commentary in the developing world that the U.S. has invaded Russia, not that Russia has invaded Ukraine,” said Dhruva Jaishankar, executive director of India’s Observer Research Foundation America.

Despite its history, he noted, Russia has somehow succeeded in not being viewed as one of the traditional colonial powers in much of the global South. “That was the exclusive domain of the U.S. and Western Europe, and this fact still colors a lot of perceptions of Russian actions.”

Czarist Russia was dubbed “the prison of peoples” by the 19th-century French traveler Astolphe de Custine, a phrase later picked up by Lenin. It was as brutal an empire as any, colonizing, displacing and murdering the indigenous populations of north Caucasus, Crimea, Siberia, and the lower Volga and repopulating these lands with Russian settlers.

The Russian Empire engaged in the Great Game with Britain for control of South Asia, joined in the Western invasion of China to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and occupied large parts of China and Persia.

The Soviet Union also invaded other nations, from Hungary and Czechoslovakia to Afghanistan. Yet it positioned itself as the ideological champion of anti-colonial causes in the developing world, offering critical support to liberation movements in Algeria, Vietnam and across Africa.

In his speech marking the annexation of four Ukrainian regions on Sept. 30, Vladimir Putin highlighted that legacy and declared that Russia—on the very day it was making new colonial acquisitions—would lead the world once again in the anti- colonial struggle.

“The West is ready to cross all lines to maintain the neocolonial system that allows it to remain a parasite, to rob the world thanks to the power of the dollar and the diktat of its technology, and to extract a tribute from humanity, basing its unearned prosperity on the hegemon’s rent,” he said.

That message resonates with many audiences. The youth league of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, for example, endorsed the annexation of the four Ukrainian regions and even sent a delegation of “observers” to the sham referendums conducted by the Russian occupation forces in the Donbas.

“If Russia is willing to endure economic sanctions at the behest of defending the defenseless, then we will stand with the oppressed people of the world,” Khulekani Skosana, the ANC youth league’s head of international relations who traveled to the Donbas and praised the fairness of the vote, said in a TV interview.

Such wholesale acceptance of Russia’s messaging may be exceptional, but the view that an historical debt is owed to Moscow is more widespread.

“Zelensky has expected the African Union and African leaders to behave in ways that do not take into consideration the history and the contribution of the Soviet Union to African struggles against colonialism,” said Ghanaian academic Emmanuel Kwesi Aning, head of research at Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center and Claude Ake visiting chair at the Uppsala University. “Those are very strong emotional points.”

Of course, Ukraine was also part of the Soviet Union at the time—and has welcomed tens of thousands of African students, including Mr. Beleniuk’s father, a Rwandan who studied aircraft engineering in Kyiv. Foreign volunteers from all over the world, including African-Americans and hundreds of people from Latin America, have flocked to Ukraine since the February invasion, joining its International Legion and other military units.

“There are plenty of Russian propaganda narratives about racism, about Nazism in Ukraine,” said Mr. Beleniuk, a wrestler who won a gold medal for Ukraine in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. “But I am the best example of how tolerant a country Ukraine is. Russia will have the right to talk about our alleged racism the moment they can show a black member of the State Duma.”

Photo caption: Demonstrators in Bamako, Mali, display an image of Vladimir Putin kicking French Pre