Russia’s war against Ukraine is deepening long-standing rifts in international relations, with the West showing robust unity but emerging nations led by China reluctant to join any front against Moscow, experts say.
Many countries, while feeling uneasy about Moscow’s attack on its neighbour, still see Western allies as also partially culpable.
At first glance, Thursday’s UN General Assembly vote calling for an immediate end to the conflict, backed by 140 of the United Nations’ 193 members, looks like an endorsement of Western condemnation of Moscow.
But “on such an obvious topic, you might have expected a much bigger majority”, said Jean-Marc Balencie, a French international relations specialist who runs a blog, Uncertain Horizons.
“The West doesn’t have the diplomatic upper hand, even on a no-brainer topic like this one,” he said. “And this was just about Russia. If one day there is a vote on China, whose means of persuasion are bigger, it would be a lot harder still.”
A former high-ranking French government official, who declined to be named, added: “Friendly neutrality towards Russia is much more widespread than we like to admit.”
Mohammed Loulichki, a researcher at the Policy Center for the New South in Morocco, said some abstentions at the UN were motivated by memories of the Soviet Union, which often backed independence movements in what was then known as the Third World.
“There is a legacy of de-colonisation. There is an affinity,” he said.
Many countries have opted for “an independent position on the Ukraine war, refusing to take sides” or to impose sanctions on Russia, said Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.
“Much of the world dislikes both Russia’s aggression as well as the West’s unilateralism in imposing sanctions and flooding Ukraine with weapons,” he said.
– ‘Watershed moment’ –
The war in Ukraine is a “watershed moment”, both polarising international politics and “loosely bifurcating” the global economy, and leading to “alternative arrangements”, including for international payments, he said.
The world’s population is roughly split in three over Russia’s war, said Agathe Demarais, Global Forecasting Director at the Economist Intelligence Unit. One third is pro-Russia, one third anti-Russia and one third neutral.
“This is a time of emancipation from the United States and the West, and of fragmentation of the global political landscape,” she said.
Among leaders refusing to condemn the Russian attack is South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who said the war “could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings” over its eastward expansion.
India, which has had a close alliance with Moscow for decades, has abstained from UN resolutions censuring Russia and continues to buy Russian oil and other goods.
In a symbolic move, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was visiting India for a two-day trip beginning on Thursday, arriving after talks in China.
In response to successive US governments using sanctions as a foreign policy tool, several countries have “explored ways to cut themselves off from the dollar” as well as the global payment system Swift, Demarais said.
According to reports, India is currently working on a rupee-ruble exchange rate mechanism for oil purchases, and Saudi Arabia is talking about a yuan-based payments channel for oil deliveries to China.
“This is a profound movement over the very long term, with China at the helm,” Demarais said. It includes the rising use of Beijing’s Cross-Border Interbank System, set up in 2015.
The resulting deep rifts may ultimately undermine the capacity of non-aligned countries to navigate between the blocs, experts predict.
“I don’t know that they’ll be able to remain neutral,” said Demarais.
In economic terms, “a global weariness towards the West” could lead to a split between countries belonging to the western financial and technology systems, and the ones who don’t, thus potentially depriving western governments of “all means of pressure”, Balencie said.
This stance could end up undermining the global hegemony of the American dollar, he said.
“A de-dollarisation of parts of the global economy could become a major feature of the post-crisis world,” he said.
