The Global South and the Russian War on Ukraine: Structural Constraints on Diplomatic Alignment
An assessment of the political, economic, and institutional factors shaping multilateral engagement with Russia's war against Ukraine
By Dr. Paul R. Williams*
Three years into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a striking diplomatic gap persists between the breadth of international condemnation and the depth of practical alignment. While 141 states voted in the UN General Assembly to demand Russia's immediate withdrawal in March 2022, the countries that have joined Western-led sanctions regimes, restricted Russian access to their financial systems, or curtailed bilateral trade with Moscow represent a narrower group. That gap is not incidental and it reflects durable structural realities across the Global South that are rooted in economic dependencies, regional security pressures, institutional history, and the architecture of development finance. Understanding those realities is a prerequisite for any realistic assessment of how the conflict's diplomatic landscape might evolve.
A related question follows from this analysis: given the structural depth of these constraints, whether Ukraine's diplomatic strategy would be better served by consolidating and sustaining existing Western commitments rather than investing heavily in outreach to states whose non-alignment is unlikely to shift within any operationally relevant timeframe.
Voting Patterns and the Geometry of Non-Alignment
United Nations General Assembly resolution ES-11/1, adopted on March 2, 2022 with 141 votes in favor, demanded Russia's immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Ukrainian territory. The 35 abstentions told their own story: India, China, South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the majority of Central Asian states declined to vote in favor. A subsequent resolution in November 2022 demanding reparations from Russia received only 94 affirmative votes, with 73 abstentions, a result that illustrated both the limits of early momentum and the increasing discomfort of non-aligned states with being asked to take progressively stronger positions.
The geography of abstention maps closely onto economic and geopolitical relationships rather than regional or ideological blocs. Several abstaining states have simultaneously affirmed Ukraine's sovereignty as a principle in bilateral diplomatic communications while declining to translate that position into a formal UN vote or participation in Western sanctions architecture. This distinction matters legally and diplomatically. Abstention is not acquiescence in Russia's conduct under international law, and most abstaining governments have been careful to preserve legal and normative space by avoiding explicit endorsement of Russia's legal arguments. What abstention does reflect is a deliberate judgment that public alignment with the Western-led coalition carries costs that outweigh the benefits, given each government's particular economic situation, security relationships, and domestic political constraints.
Ukraine's diplomatic outreach since 2022 has been genuinely extensive. President Zelensky addressed the Arab League summit in Jeddah in May 2023, his first appearance before that body, and made direct appeals on sovereignty and international law to an audience of governments that had largely abstained or remained neutral on the conflict. He engaged directly with African heads of state throughout 2023 and 2024, including a June 2023 peace summit in which several African leaders proposed a ten-point peace framework of their own.
The Peace Summit hosted in Switzerland in June 2024, which Ukraine convened as a broader multilateral gathering, attracted approximately 90 delegations, though several major Global South states either declined to attend or sent lower-level representation, and the final communiqué was not signed by a number of key developing country participants. These outcomes do not indicate diplomatic failure in any simple sense, but they do indicate that outreach and dialogue have not yet produced the depth of alignment that Ukraine and its Western partners had hoped to generate.
Embedded Economic Dependencies
The most consequential constraint on broader Global South alignment is economic rather than ideological, and it operates across energy, food, and defense procurement in ways that are deeply embedded in national development strategies.
Energy and Commodities
India's expansion of Russian crude oil imports following Western sanctions in 2022 is the most analytically significant case. By mid-2023, Russia had displaced Saudi Arabia and Iraq to become India's single largest oil supplier, accounting for approximately 40% of total crude imports. The discounts available on Russian crude, which reached $20 to $30 per barrel below Brent benchmark prices at peak in early 2022 and again in late 2025, represented a material economic benefit for an economy managing significant energy import costs and a current account sensitive to oil price movements. The Indian government has publicly defended this policy on development and energy security grounds, framing it as a sovereign economic decision rather than a geopolitical statement. India imports approximately 85% of its crude oil requirements and price sensitivity at this scale has direct effects on domestic fuel costs, inflation, and the government's fiscal position.
The broader significance of the India case is what it demonstrates about the limits of Western pressure on large emerging economies with independent development trajectories. India is simultaneously a member of the Quad security dialogue, a deepening defense partner of the United States, and a major purchaser of Russian energy. These positions are held concurrently, without apparent contradiction from New Delhi's perspective, because Indian foreign policy operates on a doctrine of strategic autonomy that predates the current conflict and reflects the foreign policy legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement. The conflict has not changed that fundamental orientation.
Food Supply Chains
The food security dimension of Global South non-alignment is particularly significant for African governments, where the dependency on Russian and Ukrainian agricultural exports created acute vulnerabilities following the February 2022 invasion. Prior to the conflict, Russia and Ukraine together accounted for approximately 28% of global wheat exports and a comparable share of sunflower oil and fertilizer supply chains. For example, the two countries supplied approximately 85% of Egyptian wheat imports before the war. The disruption of Ukrainian Black Sea grain exports following the invasion and Russia's suspension and eventual termination of the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July 2023, contributed to food price inflation exceeding 60% in Egypt by 2023, against a backdrop of a severe foreign exchange crisis and negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over a $3 billion support program. Cairo has been navigating these pressures while simultaneously managing its bilateral relationship with Washington, its arms supply relationship with Moscow, and domestic political dynamics that limit the government's tolerance for economic disruption.
The situation in Egypt is illustrative of a broader pattern across North Africa and parts of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, where governments are managing food price inflation, foreign exchange shortfalls, and IMF conditionality simultaneously, while being asked to absorb additional economic costs through alignment with Western sanctions. The structural redirection of grain supply chains of this scale is a multi-year undertaking even under favourable conditions, and alternative suppliers at comparable price points and volume have not been readily available.
Defense Procurement
Several of Russia's most significant arms export relationships involve countries that have abstained or declined to support Ukraine in formal multilateral settings. India maintains one of the world's largest accumulated inventories of Russian-origin military equipment, including Sukhoi Su-30MKI fighters, T-90 main battle tanks, S-400 air defense systems, and a fleet of Russian-built submarines and frigates. The S-400 procurement in particular generated significant friction with Washington, which threatened CAATSA (Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) sanctions before ultimately granting a waiver in 2022, partly in recognition of the strategic complexity of sanctioning a country simultaneously regarded as a key Indo-Pacific partner.
Algeria sources the overwhelming majority of its military hardware from Russia, including Su-30 and MiG-29 aircraft, T-90 tanks, and S-400 systems. Ethiopia, Vietnam, and several Southeast Asian states have similarly deep Russian equipment dependencies. The procurement relationships in question were built over decades, involve training pipelines and maintenance ecosystems that cannot be transferred overnight, and require capital outlays that Western governments have not offered to subsidise. A country seeking to transition its air force from Russian to Western platforms faces not only the capital cost of new aircraft but the cost of training new pilots and ground crews, rebuilding maintenance infrastructure, renegotiating basing and logistics arrangements, and managing a capability gap during the transition period.
Regional Priorities and the Gulf Security Environment
The Gulf Cooperation Council states, comprising Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman, represent a diplomatically and economically significant bloc whose engagement with the Ukraine conflict has been shaped primarily by a regional threat environment that has deteriorated sharply since October 2023. While Gulf states have not endorsed Russia's invasion, they have maintained independent diplomatic postures, declined to join Western sanctions regimes, and continued to participate in OPEC+, the alliance formed in 2016 between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and ten major non-OPEC oil-producing nations, in which Russia holds a co-decision-making role on global oil production.
The broader pattern across the Global South reflects a similar dynamic. Governments that are managing active or escalating security crises in their own regions have limited political bandwidth to direct toward a conflict in Europe, however significant its implications for the international legal order. The Ethiopian civil war in Tigray and Amhara, the ongoing conflict in Sudan, and persistent instability across the Sahel have consumed the crisis management capacity of African governments and regional institutions. In South and Southeast Asia, persistent territorial tensions in the South China Sea, the unresolved conflict in Myanmar, and the structural fragility of several South Asian states represent competing priorities that crowd out sustained engagement with the Ukraine file.
For Gulf states specifically, the regional threat environment has undergone a major shift since October 2023. Israel's use of force in Gaza and Lebanon, and the subsequent twelve-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, initiated a cascading escalation that Gulf capitals had actively sought to prevent, precisely because it placed them in the middle. By early 2026, Israeli and US strikes against Iranian territory, and Iranian retaliatory strikes targeting US military facilities across the Gulf, had transformed what was a serious but manageable regional tension into a direct security emergency on Gulf soil. For governments managing the consequences of missile strikes, disrupted energy exports, and acute vulnerability along the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately a third of global seaborne crude oil transits, the diplomatic bandwidth available for sustained engagement with a European land war has narrowed considerably.
The cumulative effect is that the ask being made of Global South governments to prioritize alignment on Ukraine is arriving at a moment when most of them are already absorbing the costs of conflicts and crises closer to home. That is not indifference to international law. It is the predictable consequence of asking governments operating under acute regional pressure to extend finite diplomatic capital toward a conflict whose resolution lies, in any near-term scenario, primarily in the hands of Western states and their partners.
Institutional Scepticism and the Consistency Question
Governments across Africa, Asia, and Latin America have raised, in both public statements and diplomatic communications, whether the principles most vocally championed in the Ukraine context, primarily sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the prohibition on the use of force, are being applied consistently by the Western states invoking them. The cases cited include the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Ethiopian civil war in Tigray and Amhara, the civil war in Sudan, and Israel's use of force in Gaza and Lebanon. In none of these conflicts did the Western governments now leading the sanctions coalition against Russia impose comparable measures against the parties responsible for the conduct in question, and in several cases those same governments provided arms, financing, or diplomatic cover to them.
For many Global South governments, that asymmetry is not a peripheral observation. It is the central lens through which the broader diplomatic ask is evaluated. When the same capitols that organized the fastest and most comprehensive sanctions regime in modern history declined to impose comparable measures in a conflict involving a Western ally, the conclusion drawn across much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America was not that the two situations are legally distinct, which they are, but that the architecture of international accountability is applied according to strategic interest rather than principle.
None of this amounts to a legal defense of Russia's conduct in Ukraine, which violates foundational norms of international law that exist independently of who enforces them and how selectively. The distinction, however, is precisely the point. International law derives its authority not only from its text but from the perceived legitimacy of its application. When the states most invested in enforcing a norm are also the states most visibly exempted from its consequences, the norm does not disappear, but its claim to universal obligation is weakened in the eyes of those being asked to bear the cost of upholding it. What Global South governments are contesting is not the illegality of Russia's invasion but the moral standing of the states demanding a response to it, and those are different questions.
A legal prohibition can be simultaneously valid and selectively enforced, and it is precisely that selectivity, accumulated across decades and conflicts, that has eroded the political authority the rules-based order needs to function as something other than a coalition of the willing operating under a universal banner. The ask being made of the Global South is ultimately an ask to treat that banner as genuine. For many of the governments receiving it, the evidentiary record makes that difficult to do.
The China Variable
China's economic footprint across the Global South is the largest single structural factor shaping the background conditions within which Global South governments evaluate their Ukraine-related diplomatic positioning. The relationship is not primarily about ideological affinity or coordinated diplomatic strategy, though both exist to some degree. It is primarily about the material dependencies that Chinese financing has created across a wide range of countries and the economic costs that would flow from positions that openly antagonise Beijing.
Chinese state-backed lending through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and bilateral financing arrangements has been extensive and geographically broad. Sub-Saharan Africa has received an estimated $170 billion in Chinese financing since 2000, a figure that encompasses infrastructure loans, concessional credit, and commercial bank lending. The distribution is uneven, with countries including Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo carrying particularly significant Chinese debt exposure relative to GDP. Zambia's 2020 external debt default, the first by a sub-Saharan African country in the post-pandemic period, involved Chinese creditors holding a substantial share of the debt, and its restructuring process illustrated the degree to which Chinese bilateral creditors have become central actors in sovereign debt negotiations across the continent. In Southeast Asia, Laos has a particularly deep infrastructure dependency on Chinese financing, having committed a majority stake in its national electricity grid to Chinese creditors as part of a debt restructuring arrangement. Pakistan, which straddles the South and Central Asian categories, has received approximately $26.5 billion in Chinese financing under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor component of the BRI, with total repayment obligations, including debt service and dividends, projected to reach nearly $40 billion over twenty years.
China's formal position on the Ukraine conflict, as set out in its twelve-point position paper released in February 2023 and elaborated in subsequent joint statements with Russia, declines to characterize Russia's operations as an invasion, attributes the conflict in part to NATO expansion and Western security policies, and proposes a ceasefire framework premised on conditions that Ukraine and its Western partners have not found acceptable. China has maintained and in some categories expanded its trade and economic relationships with Russia throughout the conflict. Whether trade represents deliberate state policy or the actions of Chinese commercial actors exploiting regulatory gaps has been a matter of ongoing debate, but their operational significance for Russian defense industrial production is not seriously disputed.
For governments that depend on Chinese financing for debt rollovers, infrastructure project completion, or sustained trade access, public alignment with positions that China actively opposes carries measurable costs. The relevant constraint is not that these governments will do whatever Beijing instructs. Most have demonstrated independent judgment on a range of diplomatic questions. The constraint is that the diplomatic calculus for a government managing Chinese debt obligations and seeking continued infrastructure financing includes, as a background factor, the cost of damaging a relationship with one of its most consequential creditors.
The Material Offer Gap
The diplomatic effort to build Global South alignment has been framed predominantly around normative and legal arguments, with insufficient attention to the material interests of the countries being courted. That imbalance has been noted, and has generated a persistent perception among Global South governments that the ask is being made on Western terms, without genuine reciprocity.
The concrete material incentives that could plausibly shift the cost-benefit calculation for non-aligned states, including meaningful debt relief for heavily indebted African and South Asian countries, preferential or restructured trade access to European and American markets, accelerated and genuinely concessional technology transfer arrangements, or credible security architecture for non-aligned states, have not been systematically advanced by Western governments or by the international financial institutions they influence.
The IMF and World Bank have continued to operate under standard program conditionality frameworks during this period. For governments negotiating painful fiscal adjustment programs with the Fund, including Egypt, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia, all of which have had active IMF programmes during the conflict period, the experience of conditionality is an immediate and often politically costly reality, not an abstraction. The request to absorb additional economic costs through Ukraine alignment, in an environment where the same institutional architecture is imposing austerity-adjacent conditions, generates a credibility problem that is difficult to surmount through diplomatic engagement alone.
The trade dimension compounds this problem. Several Western governments have simultaneously sought diplomatic alignment from developing nations while maintaining agricultural subsidies that depress global commodity prices for the agricultural products on which many Global South economies depend, and trade barriers including tariff structures and phytosanitary requirements that restrict market access for developing country exports. The EU's Common Agricultural Policy, the United States' domestic farm support programmes, and the various non-tariff barriers maintained by wealthy countries against developing country agricultural, textile, and manufacturing exports are well-documented features of the global trade architecture that Global South governments have sought to reform through the WTO and bilateral negotiations for decades, with limited success. The asymmetry between the standards being invoked in the diplomatic context and the economic policies being maintained simultaneously is not invisible to the governments being asked to align.
A foreign policy ask that requires a government to absorb near-term economic costs, in exchange for normative commitments from partners who are not offering near-term economic concessions, is a structurally weak diplomatic offer regardless of the merit of the underlying cause. Addressing that weakness would require a level of material reciprocity that Western governments have not yet demonstrated a willingness to extend.
Conclusion
The degree of Global South alignment with Ukraine's diplomatic position is shaped by structural constraints that operate largely independently of the legal merits of Ukraine's case or the quality of its diplomatic outreach. Economic dependencies on Russian energy, food, and defense supply chains create genuine costs for governments considering alignment. Regional security pressures, particularly across the Middle East, consume political bandwidth that might otherwise be directed toward a European conflict. Institutional scepticism about the consistent application of international legal principles by Western states creates a reception environment in which normative arguments carry less weight than their legal foundations warrant. China's economic footprint across the developing world creates background constraints on how far governments can move against Beijing's stated preferences. And the absence of systematic material reciprocity from Western governments means the diplomatic ask has been presented without the economic accompaniment that might meaningfully shift the calculus.
A more durable international coalition would require Western governments to reckon seriously with each of these dimensions, not as communication problems to be managed, but as substantive constraints that reflect the actual interests and experiences of the countries being courted. The normative case for Ukraine's position is legally sound. Whether the political authority exists to translate that case into sustained multilateral action depends on whether the states leading that effort are willing to extend the kind of reciprocity they are asking others to demonstrate.
In light of these structural constraints, there is a reasonable argument that Ukraine's diplomatic resources are more efficiently deployed in deepening and sustaining the commitments of existing allies than in pursuing incremental shifts among states whose non-alignment reflects durable material and institutional realities unlikely to change within the timeframe of the conflict. Managing alliance cohesion, particularly as domestic political pressures in key Western states create uncertainty about long-term military and financial support, may represent a higher-return diplomatic investment than continued outreach to governments whose cost-benefit calculus is structurally resistant to realignment.
* Dr. Paul R. Williams is the Co-Founder and Director of the Public International Law & Policy Group and Rebecca Grazier Professor of Law and International Relations at American University