Ukraine Must Introduce Itself

Many of the medical and engineering students who travel to Ukraine from the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and across Africa arrive, by their own account, not knowing that Ukraine and the Russian Federation are two different countries. This is not based on a simple geographic misunderstanding; it is a strategic failure that is three decades in the making. The roots are not hard to find. For its entire existence, the Soviet Union presented itself to the Third World as an indispensable friend of national liberation. It offered scholarships, weapons, and an anti-Western vocabulary of Marxist anti-imperialism. Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University, founded for students from the developing world, trained thousands of future officials, scientists, and professionals. To several generations in Hanoi, Delhi, and Maputo, “the Soviet Union” meant “Russia.” It was fully synonymous, and Ukraine was a happy and fully accepting province of it.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Though not widely remembered today, Joseph Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov successfully demanded at the end of World War II that Ukraine be given a seat, as a Soviet republic. This would be the rough equivalent of Scotland or the US state of California being given its own seat in the United Nations. Acting as a Trojan Horse planted by the Kremlin, the Ukrainian SSR’s delegation never strayed from Moscow’s position. Appointed by the Soviet Central Committee, Kyiv’s diplomats at the UN were instructed to actively build credibility with national liberation movements with newly independent African and Asian states. Soviet propaganda presented the Ukrainian SSR’s delegation to these would-be “brotherly nations” as the symbol of a liberated, sovereign, Communist society. Other Topics of Interest Ukrainian tennis star Elina Svitolina has defeated Linda Nosková 6-2, 6-1 to reach the WTA Finals championship match against Mirra Andreeva. The mission was a resounding success. More than a generation after the Soviet Union’s demise, the muddled understanding about Ukraine’s current geopolitical status remains a serious problem. Independence in 1991 should have ended the confusion. It did not, largely because Kyiv spent the next three decades speaking almost exclusively to either the Western World, or its former imperial overlords in the Kremlin, and almost never to Luanda, Dhaka or Hanoi. The international community allowed the Russian Federation to claim itself as the successor to the Soviet Union. It inherited and Soviet embassies and diplomatic mission, its Security Council seat, and cultural outreach projects; Ukraine began almost from nothing. And before the Maidan Revolution of 2013-14, Kyiv made no real attempt to distinguish itself from Moscow. The Global South saw no reason to look closer. Ukraine needs its own narrative, its own story. Blame cannot be laid solely at Kyiv’s door alone. Ukraine’s large and successful diaspora bears a share of the responsibility. Its communities are concentrated overwhelmingly in Canada and the United States, and for decades much of their energy turned inward, to arguments conducted largely among themselves. When they did look outward, they took Ukraine’s case to think tanks and policy seminars in Washington, Ottawa, London, and Brussels, to ivory-tower audience that already knew where it stood. Until recently, none have attempted to build what independent Ukraine has truly needed: sustained, organized outreach to the governments and private sectors in Africa and Asia.It has been a choice, and a costly one.The consequences arrived in March 2022. When the United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 141 countries agreed. But 35 abstained, among them India, South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Many of these governments said they supported the principle of sovereignty, but few wished to take sides in what they saw as a quarrel to be dealt with by Europe, and even fewer were interested in potentially damaging their close economic and security relations with Moscow. Clearly, Ukraine’s case had never been properly made to them.The Soviet-era bonds that tied Moscow to the Third World were reinforced shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power. The Russian Federation has nearly tripled the scholarships it offers students from African nations and has opened cultural centers and state media bureaus across the continent. Its message is consistent: the current Ukrainian government consists of nothing but Western puppets with no will of their own; Ukraine is an integral ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious part of Russia.The Middle East shows both the problem and the promise. Ukrainian wheat has long fed Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen, and thousands of Arab students have studied in Ukraine. Yet Moscow, with its military domination over Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and its ties to the Gulf, has been the more familiar voice. Ukraine’s Crimean Tatar and pro-independence Chechen populations, Muslim peoples deported by Stalin and brutalized by Moscow for centuries, are its natural ambassadors.Kyiv had just 11 diplomatic missions in Africa, and 12 in the Middle East, before the invasion. It has nearly doubled its embassies since. Russia still has twice as many, but Ukraine’s wartime developments matter. The countries that declined to choose a side are the partners Ukraine will need when the war ends. Moscow has recruited Africans, the vast majority of whom know nothing about the differences between Russia and Ukraine, to fight in the war.A nation that is not understood will find it hard, once the conflict draws to a close, to be taken seriously in countries where it is already fighting an uphill information battle. Kyiv must understand that the country’s reconstruction will be paid for, in part, by trade. Ukrainian grain already feeds many of these people.What should Kyiv do?Ukrainians need to tell their own story, not merely a story against Russia. Clearly educate the people of the developing world that Ukraine has its own language, its own history, its own borders, and its own culture. Ukraine’s history is one the postcolonial world will recognize: centuries of rule by an oppressive foreign master, the suppression of its language and culture, a famine that killed millions, centuries of slavery, and servitude.That is an identical anti-colonial narrative that belongs to Africans and Asians, as well as to Ukraine.Educational and cultural foundations need to be established. Kyiv needs to offer scholarships and exchanges. Broadcast in Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Persian, Vietnamese, Swahili, and French. Open cultural centers. And enlist those who have already studied in Ukraine, the people who know the country from firsthand experience and are its natural ambassadors.In the Gulf, where the Emirates and Saudi Arabia have already mediated prisoner exchanges and hosted talks, treat those capitals as partners, not audiences. Let the diaspora, with its wealth, its extensive universities, and political connections, finance and staff that work, rather than organize another conference for the already convinced.Make reconstruction and trade a partnership, with contracts, training, and markets open to the countries Ukraine needs. Put Ukraine’s name on the grain it ships. Aid that arrives without a flag teaches no one who sent it.Ukraine needs its own narrative, its own story. A country that has shown the world, at terrible cost, that it is a nation must now tell the world who that nation is. The war will be decided on the battlefield. The peace will be won, in part, in lecture halls, business centers, and newsrooms from Dhaka to Dakar. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.