The world majority does not support the West in the confrontation with Russia - Associate Professor at MGIMO

Countries of the “non-West” react painfully to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, but they are in no hurry to condemn the Russian Federation for its initiation, despite the fact that in the confrontation between the West and Russia, their sympathies are mostly on the side of Moscow.

Ivan Safranchuk, associate professor of the department of world political processes at MGIMO (U) of the Russian Foreign Ministry, stated this during the industrial and energy forum, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“We began to dig into the positions of different countries, developed a methodology to analyze all this and, briefly, what conclusions we came to: for the non-Western world, there is not one conflict that is currently taking place, but two conflicts.

The first is when non-Western countries look at the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, at the fighting that is taking place on the territory of Ukraine, and they do not like the conflict itself. And they really want this conflict not to happen. They want this whole fire to not happen.

And in contacts with representatives of non-Western countries, two theses arise: first, they say that it was not enough for us to have America alone, which is doing the devil in the world, now you, too, are starting to act like America. Conflicts and so on. And second, since the world majority is still made up of so-called small and medium-sized states, for them this very core of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict inevitably looks like “a big one attacked a small one.”

Of course, if you look into the details, it turns out that Ukraine is not so small, one of the largest armies in Europe, and so on, and so on. But in a broad context for the population, for the political circles of non-Western countries, if without details, how they look at all this, then for them it certainly looks like “the big one attacked the little one” and they don’t like it. Because many of these countries themselves have gone through pressure from big countries, they remember colonial times and so on.

But even at this level of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, their opinion is that the conflict is very bad, it’s bad that Russia is using armed forces, but they don’t want to hold Russia alone responsible for the conflict. In April, a draft resolution came up from South Africa, which proposed voting that the conflict is very bad, it has many bad humanitarian consequences, and we would like the conflict to not exist. But this resolution did not call Russia an “aggressor.” That is, the separation of a negative attitude towards the conflict as such and the issue of responsibility for the conflict. And during the discussion of this resolution in the UN General Assembly, it became clear that this is the position that the world majority adheres to,” Safranchuk said.

At the second level, in his opinion, non-Western countries see a conflict between the West and Russia.

“And in this conflict they definitely do not support the West. And the main tool for expressing their position on this level of conflict is their attitude towards sanctions. The attitude towards sanctions is extremely negative, and the majority do not impose sanctions.

Moreover, as Western countries increasingly globalize this part of the conflict and its escalation, the non-West is increasingly negative about the Western position in this global conflict,” the expert explained.