Ukraine blowback. How Russia is using the Global South to beat the West and strangle support for Ukraine

The Ukraine battlefield is the hottest part of Russia’s war on the West, but not the only one. The Kremlin is betting that sabotage, intimidation and other sub-threshold attacks will make Ukraine’s allies so distracted, scared and tired that they cut their support to Kyiv. Meanwhile Russia’s political warfare is reaping rewards in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The widening fronts in this global conflict are ably depicted in a new book, We Shall Outlast Them: Putin’s Global Campaign to Defeat the West by Hanna Notte. The Berlin-based, Oxbridge-educated Russia expert unpicks Kremlin influence operations in a dozen-plus countries. Her reporting is meticulous, the descriptions vivid, and the conclusion bleak: Russia is using the West’s own weakness to beat us. One paradox is globalisation: the West’s main project since the collapse of communism, but which now undermines its sanctions efforts. ‘Eurasian roundabout’ China, North Korea, Iran and other countries in what Notte calls the “Eurasian roundabout” help Russia export and import what it needs to keep its war machine running. Hard-headed shipping magnates in Dubai will not stop dealing with the “shadow fleet”, any more than Indian energy tycoons will shun cheap oil. It’s just business, they tell her. But not only that. Many in the mis-named “Global South” instinctively despise Ukraine as an American proxy. The irony is head-spinning: Ukraine is treated as a pariah for its ties to a supposed patron that has now all but abandoned it. As well as exploiting anti-Americanism (whatever that means these days) Russia also draws on deep historical sympathies that are all but incomprehensible seen from the former captive nations of Europe. Many influential Africans, for example, have bitter first-hand or inherited memories of US treatment of their continent in the Cold War, including support for apartheid-era South Africa. They also have a rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union, which supported their liberation struggle. Some studied there. That Ukraine is the victim of a revanchist imperialist Russia makes no sense to them; interviewed by Notte, they struggle to see it as a real country.