OPINION | Russia-Ukraine: Changing face of the war and Impact on the Global South - Lining up behind America's militarism in this war is not the road to a more peaceful and just world.
Most South Africans get their information about the war in Ukraine from Western media, and our own media, a good deal of which reports the Western line verbatim and uncritically.
As we approach the anniversary of the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine, now widely understood by serious analysts across the political spectrum to also be a proxy war between Russia and the United States, it is notable that this war has become a key issue in our public sphere and public consciousness. The wars in Yemen and Ethiopia, which have death tolls far higher than in Ukraine, are given very little attention.
The decision of the Brics countries — China, India, Brazil and South Africa — to remain non-aligned means that the long struggle for the autonomy of the Global South in global affairs, which goes back to theAfrica learned a hard lesson during the Cold War when it became the centre of some of the worst proxy wars between the East and the West. This left the economies of many countries in disarray and their growth curtailed and set back for generations.
A year into the war it is clear that there will be no easy victory for either party, and that neither country has any will to surrender. Emboldened by increasing US and Western aid to it, Kyiv sees no reason to go back to the table and talk to Moscow. On the other side Moscow will not step back from its demands that Nato remove its weapons from the countries on its borders and commit to not incorporating Ukraine as a member state.
Currently, Ukraine is getting what it wants: more and more dangerous and deadly weapons that will enable it to escalate this war. However, as the respected American academic Jeffery Sachs has, the US always moves on and by the time it does, Ukraine may well be a country left in rubble like Iraq, and it may well descend into factional wars like Libya.
Those countries in the Global South that are remaining non-aligned and arguing for negotiations are not, as it is often suggested, acting unethically and in concert with authoritarianism.
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