Ukraine and the global south: The ambiguities of a postcolonial perspective

Introduction

The prospects of further engaging with the countries of the global South to raise its influence in the non-Western world have recently gained prominence in the Ukrainian debate. According to many Ukrainian commentators, the Ukrainian diplomacy has traditionally paid little attention to Asia, Africa and Latin America (Kulyk, 2023). Due to that, but mostly because of long and deep-running engagement by Russia, the countries of the global South find themselves more comfortable with “neutral” position towards the Russian military interference. Ukraine’s “southern turn” is therefore a new priority for Ukrainian war-time diplomacy.

To sustain sanctions against Russia and garner international support, Ukraine recurrently relies on the pressure exerted by its Western partners on countries of the global South. However, the imperative of direct and more intense communication with non-Western regions emerges as a requisite instrument for Ukraine in fostering global solidarity against aggression. Central to this communicative endeavor is the strategic deployment of analogical reasoning, wherein parallels are drawn between Ukraine’s struggle against Russian imperial policies and the historical trajectories of anti-colonial nation-building within the global South. Therefore, the restart of the Russian aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was a major trigger for transformation of the predominantly academic discussions about postcoloniality into a matter of practical politics related to the emergence of a new frame of relations between Ukraine and the global South.

In this article I discuss the applicability of postcolonial arguments for achieving Ukraine’s goal of securing support of international community. I scrutinize the intricacies of the logic of drawing parallels and finding postcolonial analogies between Ukraine and the global South, and uncover its limits. I argue that from the practical viewpoint, postcolonialism for Ukraine might either facilitate nation building and the ensuing institutional integration with the West (following the understanding of postcolonialism in the Baltic states), or be used as a potential springboard to a symbolic association of Ukraine with a group of non-Western states building their identities on a legacy of fighting Western dominance. In pursuing the second option and reshuffling its foreign policy towards the global South on the basis of a presumption of post-colonial solidarity, Ukraine faces several major challenges.

My methodological approach is based on the concept analysis school that delves into different interpretative contexts where terms and notions are deployed. This research method is helpful for understanding how concepts are used, what meanings are attached to them, and what happens to these meanings when concepts move from one discursive field to another (Berenskoetter, 2017: 160). Since my basic concept in this article is postcolonialism, I single out three its interpretations (or versions), and discuss their political instrumentalization under specific conditions of war. Of particular importance for my analysis is the distinction between “academic language” and “practical knowledge”, or “concepts as categories of analysis and as categories of practice” (Berenskoetter, 2017: 156), which plays a crucial role for understanding Ukraine’s uneasy engagement with postcolonialism.

Structurally, the article is divided into three parts. I start with an analytical overview of the academic literature that identifies three different meanings of postcolonialism, and explain how the case of Ukraine might be related to each of them, which requires some critical reexamination of scholarly approaches. Then I turn to political instrumentalization of postcolonialism as a communicative tool in Ukraine’s foreign and security policy towards the global South after the restart of Russia’s invasion in February 2022. Finally, I discuss possible ways to reconsidering the postcolonial framework of Ukraine’s communication with non-Western countries.

My empirical base consists of such primary sources as representative speech acts (understood as public utterances and pronouncements by political leaders) containing postcolonial connotations from February 24, 2022 to 1 August, 2023. From the wealth of international rhetoric by the Ukrainian leadership (predominantly president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but also Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba and Head of the Office of the President Andriy Yermak) I have chosen speeches that both utilized postcolonial tropes and were delivered to countries of the global South or international organizations to which they belong. This represents a relatively modest proportion of Ukraine’s overall active communication with the outside world. ¹ Altogether, I cite 18 representative texts and interpret their specific communicative meanings and strategic intentions. The texts were originally published in Ukrainian or English, translated into English by the governments, or, in a few instances, by media outlets.

Ukraine as seen from the global south: Impediments for embracing the postcolonial narrative

A major barrier for a what might be dubbed ‘postcolonial solidarity’ between Ukraine and the global South is deeply political: what for the former is a strategy of protecting its ontological security through integration with the Euro-Atlantic international order, marks a subjugation to and the growing dependence on the West for the latter.

The ability and determination of the Ukrainian society to withstand the Russian aggression, and consolidate human and material resources for resistance (Kurnyshova, 2023) falls under postcolonial definition because “it released the forces of societal self-organization” (Gerasimov, 2014). This logic is important for Ukraine’s communication with the global South as it refutes Putin’s narrative of the invasion of Ukraine as a proxy war between Russia and the West, and of Ukraine as a “puppet” in the hands of NATO, stripped from its subjectivity. Yet this explanation of Ukraine’s determination to continue the struggle has not found a proper resonance in communication with the global South, and the ensuing lack of understanding of Ukraine’s existential security stakes in the war generated numerous “peace plans” and calls for negotiations and compromises from non-Western countries.

Ukraine’s strategy of breaking with the externally imposed constructs of ‘Eurasia’ and the ‘Russian world’ implies the reassertion of Ukraine as a full-fledged European nation. This drive corresponds with Maria Mälksoo’s notion of the “politics of becoming”, which marks the “self’s struggle to gain recognition of its identity from the authoritative social carries of this desired identity” (Mälksoo, 2009: 38). Ukraine struggles to get an acknowledgment that it belongs to the West, arguing that it is “returning to its native European home” (Zelenskyy, 2023c). This decisive push into the global West is meant to define Ukraine’s future civilisational choice, as a viable scenario for the end of the transition process. But from the point of view of many global South’s countries, Ukraine’s positioning within the Eurocentric paradigm is perceived as Ukraine’s decoupling from the “traditional” postcolonial development paradigm. Many in the global South – as well as among the leftist groups in the West - see such civilizational decoloniality as a new form of dependence on Western security and financial assistance and a form of neo-liberal colonial subjugation. By making this point, opinion makers in the global South project on Ukraine their own deplorable experiences: “the historical tragedy of the global South in the 20th century was that various economic, social, and political decolonization efforts in the end lost to either old prolonged or new forms of subjugations, which have by now consolidated into a plutocratic and capitalist world order” (Ngoc Minh Nguyen, 2023). This narrative adds to my argument that Eurocentric and postcolonial orientations in Ukraine’s wartime diplomacy are rather contradictory.

Ukraine’s continued engagement with the EU and NATO, adherence to liberal international norms, and standing against Russia as “the biggest anti-European force of the modern world” (Zelenskyy, 2023a), are critically taken in many countries of the former ‘Third World’ as Eurocentric, which exacerbates the widespread feeling that the war in Ukraine is by and large a Western affair. In other words, many nations of the global South suspect that “post-Soviet region’s European peoples may be convinced that something radically, even ‘racially’, differentiates them from the postcolonial Philippines and Ghanaians who might otherwise claim to share their situation” (Moore 2006: 20).

The global South sees Ukraine as “a distant conflict that is not its war” (De Santayana, 2022) which sets another limit for the acceptance of Ukraine as a nation with postcolonial identity in the global South. “As Ukraine is supported by the West, it is not easy for these countries to lay their anti-Western sentiments aside and recognise that Russia is acting like a colonial power and failing to respect Ukrainian sovereignty” (Dabrowska, 2023). Ukraine sees prospects of its eventual victory as “a victory by a state which is traditionally been seen as peripheral, which is traditionally been seen as colonial against a power which was like to see itself as central and as imperial” (Snyder, 2022) and argues that opposition to Russia today is a proper example of anti-colonial struggle, but these arguments are mostly accepted and shared within the post-Soviet and East European (or former Russia’s colonial) space and have a weaker appeal in the so-called ‘developing world’ (Couch, 2023).

The sympathy of the global South to Russia and its deafness to the above-mentioned argument are empowered by the fact that no African or Latin American country has been ever a Russian colony. On the contrary, the Soviet Union was a champion of decolonization in the mid-XX century and an important partner for de-colonized, newly independent countries during the Cold war. Russia continues the monopolization of narratives that are typical of Soviet foreign policy, simultaneously attributing to itself all the merits once achieved with respect to countries in the global South. Thus, resistance to the “neocolonial policies of the West” is a component of the Concept of Russia’s foreign policy adopted in 2023. In it, Russia emphasizes the processes of decolonization and the establishment of a multipolar world order. Those sentiments strongly resonate among many nations of the global South and are an integral part of their postcolonial discourse (Sousa, 2016). That is why their “national histories make it hard <…> to see Russia as the ‘bad guy’ (Wepukhulu, 2022). And it is not just political leadership or “undemocratic regimes” in the global South that support Russia. Polls suggest that public opinion in the global South is also favorable to the country that Ukraine and the West rightfully see as aggressor. While in the global North about 90% of the population hold a negative view of Russia, in the global South “the picture is reversed and 66% feel positively towards Russia” (Foa et al., 2022) and think of Russia as a force of resistance to the hegemony of the West. Having in mind that many people in the global South “experienced NATO, Europe and the US in other ways than ‘good’”, they see Western calls for alignment against Russia as hypocritic and destructive to their own interests (Wepukhulu, 2022).

There is another point that makes doubtful a consensus between Ukraine and the global South regarding postcolonial stance. Many non-Western countries perceive Ukraine not as a nation struggling with terminating its postcolonial dependency on Russia, but as a source of agricultural products (grain, wheat, etc.) whose absence in the international food markets creates new insecurities. The visit of an African delegation to Kyiv and Moscow in June 2023 gave a clear example of this attitude (Vladimir Putin 2023) and became an additional instrument of pushing Ukraine towards negotiations with the Kremlin beyond the Ukrainian formula of a just peace implying the full withdrawal of the occupying troops from the Ukrainian territory, legal persecution of war criminals and post-war reparations. Ukraine does need its ports being unblocked, but the political price it had to pay for the grain deal initiative is the acceptance of Russia’s legitimate security role in providing safety corridors, as opposed to Ukraine’s overarching strategy of isolating and excluding Russia unless it pulls out of Ukraine.

Another illustration of the predominant focusing of the global South on material issues is a widely spread narrative of the Western assistance to Ukraine exceeding the previous help to non-Western nations (Bidochko, 2023b). This reproach is often expressed in conjunction with the unfairly strong focus to the war in Ukraine in comparison with other global wars and unequal treatment of refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere. Developing nations blame former colonial powers and their allies for being one-sided, demanding solidarity only when it suits the West’s best interests. In their view, lack of solidarity from the West during the Covid-19 pandemic, unequal access to vaccines and other medicines makes Western calls for isolation and punishment of Russia hypocritical (Lupel and Russo, 2023).

Sanctions are another divisive element between Ukraine and the global South. The majority of the developing countries, including India or Brazil, never joined Western sanctions. Partly the reason for that is their economic interests, because Russia is one of their biggest suppliers of energy and food (Askew, 2023). And it is the global South that bears a substantial part of the economic costs of the war, as these nations are suffering “from its consequences: rising energy and food prices, inflation and the risk of a serious downturn in the global economy” (De Santayana, 2022: 9). This contributes to the overall discontent with the policy of economic restrictions against Russia across the global South, as those nations blame sanctions for the economic downturn and deem that sanctions are hurting them the most. For the global South “the weaponization of economic and financial ties” (Dabrowska, 2023) is a dangerous turn.

These points explain a limited purchase of postcolonial arguments for Ukraine. For example, as in his 1, 5-h long interview with Latin American journalists, as well as during the meeting with the leaders of Africa, President Zelenskyy avoided mentioning issues that might have resonated with the postcolonial logic (Zelenskyy, 2023d). Another example is a bunch of critical comments in the Ukrainian media regarding the visit of the African delegation to Kyiv and Moscow: thus, Olexiy Haran referred to a high level of corruption in the South African government that, in his view, might facilitate business-as-usual connections between Moscow and Pretoria (Garan’, 2023).

Against this backdrop, some authors suggest that “if postcolonialism is supposed to become a new identity category for Eastern Europe, it will bring more problems than profits” (Kołodziejczyk, 2014: 140). This skeptical attitude is sustained by those voices who claim that postcolonial argument might be used as an anti-Western rhetorical weapon by dictatorial regimes in the global South (Klyszcz, 2023). In the words of the Ukrainian Nobel prize winner who was visiting South Africa, “it was disheartening that this country had not taken a stronger stance in speaking up about the illegal invasion by Russia. For Ukrainians, who know Nelson Mandela and the struggle of the South African population for dignity, equality and human rights, it’s truly quite disappointing” (Barlett, 2023).

When the UN General Assembly voted for resolutions condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine, most of the nations from the global South supported the respective documents (Shidore, 2022). But despite being on the same page with the West in support of the UN Charter and other international norms, the global South neither severed its relations with Russia, nor supported Ukraine militarily. They criticized the West for a lack of efforts to reach peace arrangements and called Ukraine to compromise with Russia (Mexican, 2022; Tani and Jibiki 2022). The global South claims that it is not supporting Russian aggression and is standing for the global order and international norms, but at the same time, it doesn’t support the approach by the West to punish the aggressor. Countries of the global South are minding their interests and in fact have already established a third - neutral - side in the conflict, thus reviving the old philosophy of non-alignment.

Postcolonial framing reconsidered

As I posited in the previous section, in developing Ukraine’s strategic narrative, two important stereotypes have been long underestimated. First, postcolonial discourses in the global South are marked by viewing Russia as a country fighting and resisting the Western neoimperialism and interventionism. This misperception is rooted in the remaining mythologies of the Cold war and the non-aligned movement. Secondly, the countries of the global South bear a substantial part of the economic costs of the war. This is why analogical reasoning built upon the postcolonial arguments does not work properly, and overcoming the aforementioned problems requires revised narratives that might resonate in the global South. Two of them are of particular salience - appeals to ethical and humanitarian norms (not universalist values, which perceived as a product of Western civilization) and adherence to transactional approach.

References to such norms as human security and the value of human life might have audience in the global South. Pursuing this goal, often emotionally charged, is a discursive strategy with which Ukrainian diplomacy explicates how the country suffers from Russia’s invasion, and seeks justice for the crime of aggression not only for itself, but for other potential future victims of aggression, regardless of their geographical belonging. Thus, during his address to the deputies and the people of Mexico, the President of Ukraine tried to convey the message that regardless of the country or continent, people’s lives and peace are the highest values, that aggression and brutality are criminal acts committed by “man-made evil” (Zelenskyy, 2023b). The tragedy of civilian casualties is universally understandable, however, adding to that a country-/region-specific approach might spawn even more empathy: be it reference to the sufferings of the indigenous people of Crimea – Tatars - when appealing to Muslim countries, or similarities with the outrages of the Wagner para-military group in Ukraine or African countries.

The president’s appeal to humanitarian values is a message that might liaise positions of Ukraine and the countries of the global South. Refraining from the regular rhetoric about defending democracy, Ukraine will be better positioned to emphasize that Ukrainians and peoples of the global South “are not different” when it comes to values. The logical continuation of this reasoning is the call to defend the norms and principles of the UN Statute, and thus the protection of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and all the nations of the world. Namely, by resisting the Russian invasion, Ukraine is reestablishing its sovereignty and acquiring its voice on the global arena, which may resonate with the widespread sentiment in the global South about “willful selective hearing” of Africa's voices in the West. Welcoming the delegation of African countries to Ukraine in June 2023, Zelenskyy ascertained that the voice of the African continent should be heard by the world, in particular, when it comes to fundamental security issues based on the UN Charter and the entire system of international law (Zelenskyy, 2023e).

In a similar vein, Ukrainian political leadership underscored the connection between sovereignty and effectiveness of international institutions, with the UN being the main guarantor of security for small and mid-size states: “Preserving our independence, guaranteeing our security, returning normal economic ties with Ukraine will restore the true power of the UN Charter and save the world from the crises we are all forced to experience now” (Zelenskyy, 2022n). In an opposite case, the war will reign in international politics, with the arms race, great power management, and nuclear blackmailing – all those areas where both Ukraine and the global South have the least subjectivity, and therefore are the least protected. “It is the injustice of the security structure of the whole world that needs to be changed… Today, when we talk about security guarantees for Ukraine, we act as a living yet tragic example that can later be extended to other continents and other states,” he argued (Zelenskyy, 2022O). In its turn, Russia’s similar declared commitments to the existing international order are increasingly at odds with its aggressive power politics, namely, the violation of two of the core principles of the UN Charter: nonuse of force and territorial integrity of states.

Since many countries of the global South associate the rules-based international order with Western hegemony, transactional arguments may be another alternative to consider. Transactional relationships are not grounded in common values, and shared historical bonds are of a secondary (Bashirov and Ihsan, 2019) consideration. What matters is the substance or gains (or relief from major issues) such relations could deliver to the country. For Ukrainian diplomacy it is difficult to get support from countries with whom Ukraine has limited economic or political cooperation. Some of the limitations of Ukraine’s wartime diplomacy in the global South are structural: given the scarce resources during the war, Ukraine is not able to offer much in terms of investments or even diplomatic presence. However, as transactional relations do not entail strategic or long-term partnership and prioritize short-term wins, they may be an instrument of choice for Ukraine on several occasions. For instance, Ukraine continues to supply food to Africa and stresses that it has not left African countries with food problems despite the war. As Zelenskyy highlighted, Ukraine is already becoming a leader of global efforts for food security and the Ukrainian agricultural sector is helping guarantee food and social security in the countries of Africa (Zelenskyy, 2022l). Interestingly enough, this approach to solving urgent food issues was also adopted by Russia, which during its summit with African states (2023) has committed to compensate grain shortages. The difference, however, is significant, because, as the EU High Representative put it, Russia is “pretending to solve a problem it created itself “ (Russia must, 1923).

In certain cases, the normative and the transactional approaches might coincide or find a common denominator. When in July 2023 Russia announced its withdrawal from Grain agreement and refused to keep guaranteeing the safety of transport, Zelenskyy addressed President of Türkiye Erdoğan and UN Secretary General Guterres with a proposal to continue the Black Sea Grain Initiative or its analog in a trilateral format (without Russia) because “our food export allows saving lives in the countries, as I said, like Yemen and Somalia… different people… of different religions, different ethnic origins… But they all have the same right to life!” After the Russian missile strike on Ukrainian sea port infrastructure (July 2023) Zelenskyy framed it as a terrorist strike that proves “to target not only Ukraine… as in the ports that were attacked, about a million tons of food were stored… It is the volume that should have been delivered to countries in Africa, in Asia…” (Zelenskyy, 2023g).

Such appeals to the global South’s concerns speak better than “you are either with us, or against us” approach. An attempt to drag the global South into the anti-Russian coalition on the Western terms, without respect to the interests of the other party, is rather alienating Ukraine from Asia, Africa and Latin America than closing the existing gap between them. As many in the global South openly oppose the Western agenda in the war (Prashad, 2023), such a stance is destructive for the Ukrainian attempts to build mutual trust. Understanding that, in its appeals to the global South, the Ukrainian political leadership employs the mixture of rationality and emotions. Hard security is complemented with the sensitive issues of food supplies, maritime trade, energy and nuclear instability. To secure a uniform response to the war Ukraine seeks a formula of strategic narrative to resonate with a broad range of policy issues.

Conclusions

In this article I argued that Ukraine faces a challenge of producing a postcolonial and in the meantime pro-Western type of agency. For at least a couple of decades the Ukrainian academic discourse was significantly shaped by multiple references to postcolonial narratives adapted to Ukraine’s overall strategy of escaping the post-Soviet space through Europeanization and nation building. Hence the postcolonial approaches in Ukraine were introduced to counter Russian interventionism, rather than as a blueprint of Ukraine’s strategic development. The dissociation from the remnants of the Soviet empire could be interpreted as a penchant to avoid Orientalization and get rid of being perceived as a marginal/peripheral country and an object of Russian great power ambitions. Therefore, Ukraine’s refusal to be a Russian subaltern (Bidochko, 2023a) and Ukraine’s Europeanization are the two sides of the same coin.

Unlike the original meanings of the postcolonial theory, the Ukrainian debate on postcoloniality was meant to reposition Ukraine as a full-fledged European (or Central European) nation and integrate in the Euro-Atlantic West. In this vein, postcolonialism is largely interpreted not from the vantage point of hybridity and the ensuing dependency on the former metropolitan power, but as a precondition or a springboard to the reassertion of Ukraine’s belonging to the liberal international society and its West-centric security order. This made the Ukrainian narrative on postcolonialism more in line with the perspective of decolonization as de-Sovietization and de-communisation rather than with accentuating the vulnerabilities of its victimhood. In this respect Ukrainian de-colonization is harmonious with similar transformations in Baltic and Central European states with their strong emphasis on rebuilding national communities and identities.

This explains why the utilization of postcolonial narratives in Ukraine’s strategic communication with the global South faces certain limitations. Even though the majority of non-Western countries declared neutrality towards the Russian military interference in Ukraine, the prospects of speaking in one voice with the global South based on alleged similarities of postcolonial transition look murky. Moreover, on many accounts, Ukrainian outlook and those of most postcolonial nations in the global South are almost on the opposite sides of the global political spectrum. Where Ukraine sees breaches of international order and defense of independence, the global South sees primarily hegemonic policies of the West and inequalities of Eurocentric world order. Likewise, postcolonial views of the international order, as it was developed in the political and historical space of the global South, keep Russia apart from other colonial powers.

That is why it is not enough for Ukraine to embrace postcolonial attitudes of developing countries to close the extant gaps with the global South. Today's postcolonial lens in the global South’s politics is a lens of North/South divide, which means it's highly challenging to be ‘one of us’ for the global South and to aspire to cement its own place as a part of the West. For Ukraine to integrate in the Euro-Atlantic security community is an existential need because the very survival of the nation in the ongoing war depends on Western support. That means that Ukraine’s engagement with the postcolonial paradigm is doomed to remain conditional and contextual– at least so long as this paradigm continues to dichotomize the West and the South.