VOn Friday March 15, in New York, while Russian voters were voting to re-elect their president, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsya, issued a joint statement condemning Russia’s organization of the vote in the territories it illegally occupies in Ukraine, “in violation of international law”.
This declaration was co-signed by a group of around fifty states, all “Western”, with the exception of Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, the Marshall Islands, Liberia, Paraguay, Palau and of Uruguay. We are far from the 141 member states which, during a vote in the General Assembly two years ago, condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In reality, approaching the second anniversary of the large-scale invasion, Mr. Kyslytsya’s allies have advised him against attempting another vote of condemnation: this time, they warned, it would not rally more than 110 states. Out of a total of 193, this result would be counterproductive.
What happened ? The war in Gaza and the refusal of the United States to act with Israel to prevent it from continuing its offensive in the enclave after the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, shattered the fragile consensus on the condemnation of Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council. Already, during 2022, when it appeared that the war in Ukraine was going to last, solidarity with the Western bloc behind Ukraine had started to crack. The head of Indian diplomacy, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, summed up the doubts of the Global South with this formula: “Somewhere, Europe must get rid of the idea that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but that the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems. »
The insistence of the West in wanting to ban Russia from the international community for its war of marked aggression and the violation of the United Nations charter quickly led to the resurgence of the trial of “double standards”, starting with that of the American intervention in Iraq, and the indifference of the same Westerners to other wars, those taking place in the South and which do not affect them.
The diplomatic dynamic has changed sides
The war in Gaza and its terrible human toll have exposed the inexorable erosion of an international system dominated by the United States. “Champion of international law on Ukraine, Europe has shown itself divided on Gaza”, regrets an Asian diplomat. When Russia’s representative to the UN responded to his American interlocutor before the Security Council a few weeks ago that he had no lessons to learn “of the country that sowed ruin in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yugoslavia”it was clear that the diplomatic dynamic had changed sides.
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