Four years into Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, Western analysts still obsess over sanctions packages, weapons shipments and NATO statements. The question remains what Washington and Brussels will do next.
But another story deserves far more attention – the attitude of states that should know better than to fence-sit or tacitly play along or do business with Russia behind the facade of pragmatic indifference.
India, Pakistan, South Africa, Algeria – and countries like them that built their entire identities on resisting foreign domination – are cases in point. Their founders fought empires, endured occupation, and sacrificed everything for sovereignty. Now they’re helping bankroll exactly the kind of imperial conquest their grandparents died fighting.
The contradiction cuts deepest with India. Here’s a country that positions itself as the world’s largest democracy and champion of the Global South. Yet as Russian missiles rain down on Ukrainian apartment buildings and maternity hospitals, as Moscow annexes territory and erases borders, New Delhi offers nothing but silence and evasive excuses.
The numbers tell the story. Before the invasion, India bought perhaps 2% of its oil from Russia. By mid-2023 over 40%. India became the single largest buyer of Russian seaborne crude. This wasn’t business as usual – it was opportunism. While the West tried to starve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine, India threw it a lifeline at bargain prices.
South Africa, born from the anti-apartheid struggle, has cozied up to Moscow and refused to condemn the invasion with any conviction. Brazil’s initial response suggested both sides shared blame – as if there’s no difference between invader and invaded.
Algeria, which fought an eight-year independence war against France that killed over a million people, abstains when the UN votes on Ukraine while deepening energy ties with Russia. Angola, which threw off Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 after years of armed resistance, didn’t just abstain when the world moved to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council – it voted against the measure.
These are countries that should recognize imperialism when they see it. Instead, they’ve become remarkably selective about when anti-colonial principles actually apply.
Hollowness and opportunism
The hypocrisy of the UN voting record is impossible to ignore. In March 2022, 141 nations demanded Russia withdraw from Ukraine. India abstained. So did South Africa, Algeria, and Angola. Two months later, 93 countries voted to kick Russia off the Human Rights Council. The same pattern emerged. Azerbaijan found another dodge: it simply doesn’t show up for votes. That’s not confusion – that’s strategy.
While the international community has tried to isolate an aggressor, these states have provided cover.
UN abstentions aren’t neutral. In a system built on consensus, refusing to take a stand weakens the entire structure. Every abstention tells would-be aggressors the rules are negotiable if enough friends are willing to look away. Every absence chips away at the idea that sovereignty means something universal.
But the UN votes expose something worse than diplomatic cowardice. They reveal a fundamental hollowness in these nations’ post-independence projects. Many of the same governments that lecture the West about respecting their sovereignty routinely crush human rights at home or pay mere lip service to democracy.
India, for instance, still tolerates a hierarchical caste system despite the incompatibility of social inequality with democracy. It also maintains what can only be called an occupation in the Kashmir region, which it contests with Pakistan. Both nations are former colonies, yet neither has qualms about refusing to take sides on Russia’s imperialistic war against Ukraine while continuing to buy energy and arms from Russia. Russia considers India its “strategic partner,” while Pakistan relies more on Russia’s ally – China.
South Africa – once the world’s moral conscience during apartheid – has devolved into what Corruption Watch and others describe as a kleptocracy that embraces authoritarians abroad. Algeria effectively suppresses its Berber minorities at home while maintaining a strategic military partnership with Russia. Angola’s MPLA party has consolidated one-party rule, enriching elites while silencing dissent. Abroad, it pursues “strategic non-alignment.”
Then there’s the energy security rationale. India needs cheap oil; Russia’s been selling at a discount. Algeria has expanded gas deals with Gazprom. Fine – but there’s a difference between maintaining trade relationships and war profiteering. India didn’t just continue buying Russian oil; it massively expanded purchases precisely when Russia was most desperate for revenue to fund its invasion.
Some invoke “multipolarity” as if it’s a principle rather than a talking point. But a multipolar world still needs rules. Sovereignty still has to mean something. Otherwise, multipolarity’s just a prettier name for letting the strong devour the weak – which is exactly what colonialism was.
Moscow’s justification for invading Ukraine could have been lifted from any colonial power’s playbook: Ukraine isn’t a real nation, just an artificial construct, it says. Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” unnaturally separated. Kyiv is controlled by “Nazis” threatening Russian speakers. Annexation merely restores historical unity.
European colonizers made identical arguments: colonial subjects weren’t ready for self-governance, imperial rule was civilizing, and borders created artificial nations that needed European supervision. The words change; the logic of domination stays the same.
In occupied Ukrainian territories, Russia imposes Russian curricula in schools, forces residents to accept Russian passports, deports Ukrainian children to Russia for “re-education.” These are textbook tools of cultural genocide – the same methods colonial powers used to erase indigenous identities. Nations that endured such erasures themselves now watch it happen in real time and shrug. Or worse, they keep doing business with the perpetrator.
Four years in, some uncomfortable honesty is overdue. India, Algeria, Angola, South Africa and others can’t claim the moral authority of their anti-colonial past while enabling neo-colonial aggression in the present. They can’t invoke sovereignty and self-determination as sacred when it suits them, then treat those principles as negotiable when it doesn’t.
Basic laws and principles at stake
Non-alignment doesn’t mean staying neutral between aggressor and victim. It means opposing imperialism no matter who’s practicing it.
If territorial integrity mattered for India in 1947, for Algeria in 1962, for Angola in 1975, then it matters for Ukraine in 2025. If self-determination’s a right, it belongs to Ukrainians as much as anyone else. If colonialism was wrong when Europeans did it, it’s wrong when Russia does it.
The stakes go beyond Ukraine. Every abstention, every discounted oil shipment, every carefully worded non-condemnation sends a message to Beijing: Taiwan’s fate is negotiable. Spheres of influence matter more than sovereignty. The international order runs on power, not law.
And here’s the really disturbing part: even the US is now undermining the very order it built. In February 2025, the Trump administration – along with Hungary and Israel – voted against a UN General Assembly resolution supporting Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
And on the very fourth anniversary of Russia’s all-out attack on Ukraine, on Feb. 24, the US once again let Ukraine and its friends down by abstaining in a new UN vote backing the victim of Putin’s aggression.
The country that spent decades championing sovereignty and self-determination, which was an architect of the post-war international system, has failed to uphold those principles at a time when they matter so much.
This doesn’t excuse the hypocrisy of India, Brazil, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Hungary and the rest, who behaved predictably in the latest UN vote dealing with Ukraine. It exposes just how fragile the international order has become. When even Washington abandons consistency for transactional politics, it reveals what former colonies have long suspected: that the rules were always negotiable for the powerful.
But recognizing that double standard doesn’t make their own complicity any less damaging. If anything, it makes principled opposition to imperialism more urgent, not less. The erosion of American moral authority should be a warning, not a license for others to follow suit.
The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.