“How shameful that countries, which should be at the forefront of the fight to protect Ukraine, are doing the colonial power Russia’s job”.
Lviv
It is strange and totally unacceptable that several developing countries neither can nor will understand what is going on in Europe.
Russia’s war in Ukraine surely is not only a war – unjust and criminal – against a peaceful neighboring republic, the unprecedented brutal and bloody attempt at reconquering Ukraine, which the ruling gangsters in the Kremlin consider a renegade Russian colony, called Novorossiya. It is also, in its conception and material scope a war against Western civilization, against democracy, and against the rule of law.
That the victims of past European imperialism serve present days´ Russian imperialism as extras or – if you will – useful idiots is both odd and awful.
A delegation of African heads of state and government visits President Zelenskyy in Kyiv and the warmonger Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. The Ukrainians received the Africans politely, but skeptically. They have long established that many in the Third World prefer fascist Russia to democratic Ukraine. The fact that North Korea, Venezuela, Eritrea, and Cuba leads this disgusting company can be written off as unimportant. More important, indeed worse, is that India, South Africa, Senegal, Egypt, and Brazil, all of whom should know better and undoubtedly do so, are taking advantage of war-torn Ukraine. That half a dozen ambitious, but democratically suspicious African countries find it opportune to play the role of apologists for Russian colonialism is not just the business of these countries. It must concern the West, which year after year assists Africa with billions of dollars and euros and receives very little in return.
The Africans’ mission — peace or no peace — was doomed in advance. If the delegation did not know this, it knew nothing. In the view of the Putin-mafiosi, the visit was usefully in tone with the stream of lies and propaganda, which emanates ceaselessly from Moscow. The Ukrainians rightly considered their so-called guests to be more or less on the side of the Russian aggressor. Kyiv’s aim is to restore the state of affairs ante bellum 2014, not to waste time or energy on deceitful diplomacy. What is there to discuss for the moment? A partition of Ukraine, which would be a partition of Europe? Why not a partition of Senegal or Uganda or The Congo?
Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world are dealing with probably well over 200.000 dead and maimed, with between ten and fifteen million refugees, with genocide, with the abduction of thousands of children, and the annihilation of entire cities, with mad nuclear threats, with an artificially induced natural disaster at the Dnipro and with crazy claims that a democratically organized and internationally recognized European republic does not exist at all. Had the Africans been in possession of a minimum of decency they would – in Kyiv, in Skt. Petersburg and globally – have condemned, loud and clearly, the perpetrator of these crimes and their solidarity with the victim. They did not do so.
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa demanded an end to the war without even remotely explaining the outline, much less the content of peace. It was cheap talk. The war ends the moment the Russian occupation force is expelled from Ukraine. The Africans know it, the warmonger in the Kremlin knows it, everyone knows it.
In retrospect, the African mission looks like brain damage, exemplified by Ramaphosa´s official spokesman. Everyone saw and everyone heard that Kyiv was subjected to a massive Russian rocket attack during the visit of the Africans (Putin’s disdainful greeting to the guests). Whereupon the spokesman – still completely official – compromised the mission with his absurd claim that the attack never took place, that it was Ukrainian disinformation, that it was fake.
The Africans in Ukraine and Russia were fake from start to finish. How shameful that countries, which by virtue of their historical experience should be at the forefront of the struggle to protect Ukraine, present themselves as the errand boys of colonialist Russia.
Author: Per Nyholm
Danish journalist since 1960, based in Austria, columnist and foreign correspondent at the liberal Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten. This text was written for The Ukrainian Review.
