PETER BRUCE | Nato claim hints  at ANC’s true stance on Russia

I was flabbergasted to read in a just-published and rather inconspicuous New York Times interview that President Cyril Ramaphosa, believes Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 because Ukraine wanted to join Nato.

“As Mr Ramaphosa sees it,” the article read, “Ukraine’s effort to join Nato was a central cause of the conflict between the two nations.” And given that it was one of the causes of the war, he said, Russia’s demand that Ukraine not join Nato “needs to be heeded”. At the same time, the paper reported Ramaphosa saying, “The guarantees that Ukraine wants also need to be heeded. There needs to be a balance.”

I’ve never heard him say it before and if this was the pitch he made when he led an African intervention to Kyiv and Moscow in June 2023, it’s easy to see why it failed. The Nato story is a core Russian talking point and entirely rubbish. Russia invaded the Crimea, an integral part of Ukraine, in 2014 after an uprising in Kyiv that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.

Yanukovych was a puppet who, at Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s command, had refused to sign an association agreement with the EU. He fled to Moscow, and Putin immediately began planning the annexation of Crimea. Would Ramaphosa support its return to Ukraine?

You have to ask which of these countries we might support if they were directly threatened by Russia. The answer has to be none

I vividly remember former president Jacob Zuma convening senior South African journalists at his Pretoria residence at the time, and when asked what he thought of events in Crimea, he said Russia had a right to control its own sphere of influence.

That is exactly what Ramaphosa was telling the Times this week, and it has taken US President Donald Trump to apply the doctrine to his “own” Western hemisphere in Latin America, Canada and Greenland to show us all how ugly, immoral and destructive it is.

Trump, of course, does not control himself the way Putin does, but with Ramaphosa having finally revealed himself, you understand why he insists on personal control of foreign policy and why we are unable to take a non-aligned stance when countries the ANC is close to, like Iran, murder their own citizens.

It is one thing to condemn the extremes of the West and Israel and quite another to condone the human rights abuses of Iran, China, Cuba and a string of African autocracies, as South Africa routinely does. If you really think Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was reasonable, you’re no better than he is. You’re not non-aligned; you’ve taken sides.

Russia’s neighbours are so frightened they have joined Nato in droves since they were first able to. That’s because Russia is a cruel totalitarian state which deeply resents the collapse of the old Soviet Union and its loss of empire and wants as much of it back as possible. The ANC, old itself now and still miserable, feels Russia’s pain as its own.

In 1999, Czechia, Hungary and Poland, all former Soviet satellites, joined Nato. In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, many of which share a border with Russia, as does Ukraine, signed up. No-one forced them. In 2009 Albania and Croatia. In 2023, after the current invasion of Ukraine, Finland and, in 2024, Sweden.

You have to ask which of these countries we might support if they were directly threatened by Russia. The answer has to be none. If it is reasonable, as we clearly believe, that Russia should fear Nato on its doorstep, why should it stop at Ukraine?

I’m glad Ramaphosa has properly ripped the mask off, for me at least, the ANC and his own foreign policy, though I would have hoped for a different, more decent, more independent result. It’s too late now to one-hand-other-hand your way through the appalling US and Israeli war on Iran. With our “friendship” tucked permanently in its pocket, the Iranian theocracy has been able to destabilise the Middle East and butcher its own people for decades. But as you sow …

Back in February 2022, Ramaphosa instructed the department of international relations and co-operation to retract a statement condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s clear now that at the time he supported the Russian position.

Ever since, he has been trying to weave his way into a safer geopolitical space, but it hasn’t worked. Even as the attacks began last weekend, all he could manage was a call on the Presidency website for “inclusive dialogue”. But nobody listens to South Africa anymore. We’ve lost our voice, and it’ll be up to a new generation to find it again.