Former president Jacob Zuma says Vladimir Putin is a ‘man of peace’. President Cyril Ramaphosa says the West isn’t doing enough to support a peaceful resolution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. We unpack the issues around South Africa’s stance of neutrality on an escalating war.
which showed African students at a Moscow university being given bananas and called “monkeys”.
A tweet by the Russian embassy in South Africa last week, retweeted by Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula, repeated a claim often made by Putin: that Russia is “fighting Nazism in Ukraine”. Putin himself enjoys near-adoration from far-right groups worldwide due to the perception that he holds the line against the tide of “wokeness” flooding parts of the planet. A prominent figure in the US religious right, Rod Dreher, summed up this position recently when
The relentless focus of the media on the Ukraine war has also been a source of frustration for many South Africans, who point out that there has been far less attention and concern spent on conflicts closer to home, primarily involving black or brown people. The situation has been exacerbated by the There is no possible justification for much of this, but there are some reasonably valid reasons for the seemingly disproportionate volume of media coverage. One is the prospect of nuclear war, which should terrify us all.