Page 31 - bne_May magazine 2023_20230503 BRICS

bne May 2023 Cover story I 31
economy remains one of the most dependent on Russian supplies of materials and energy. But Orban has been an outspoken supporter of Putin and frequently clashed with Brussels, and not only over Russia; Hungary resents getting orders from Brussels in general.
Likewise, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to benefit from the sanctions on Russia by boosting trade and playing middleman between the two warring sides.
But maybe the most outspoken of the second tier European states is Serbia. Sofia too has long and deep historical and cultural ties to Russia and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of the sanctions regime who, like Lavrov, has taken the unusual step of speaking out against the pressure the rest of the EU has exerted on Serbia to join the sanctions regime.
Vucic complained in a recent interview with TV Prva that the Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom told him “over and over again” to impose anti-Russian sanctions, and threatened to block Serbia’s accession to the EU if it did not join Nato.
"He said our European path depends
on that," the Serbian leader related.
"He said that Serbia must join Nato, because Russia had shown that it is a threat to everyone. We cannot join Nato, because it was Nato that threatened
us – a country whose troops have never crossed another country’s border.
Yet you were the ones to come to our territory and kill our people here. We will never join Nato, we will maintain our military neutrality.”
Serbs are already angry at the US, which has spent more than $1bn on upgrading Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, which was established during the Nato campaign in the Balkans and used to bomb Serbia, as bne IntelliNews reported in feature Playing Real Risk. It continues
to threaten the region and is hugely controversial.
The Serbian example is especially
telling, as the Balkan campaign at the end of the 1990s is one of the examples where Nato acted as an aggressor and not defensively, bombing Serbia, albeit to stop the genocide that was going on in the country at the time.
The resentment at Western lectures
is even more pronounced in Africa, which is still visibly smarting from their colonial experience. Lavrov was touring Africa in the middle of April to warm receptions all round, but when French President Emmanuel Macron went
on a four country tour of francophone countries he faced protests at nearly every stop.
Macron was badly caught off guard and roasted on live TV by Felix Tshisekedi, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, during a joint televised press conference two weeks ago. “This must change, the way Europe and France treat us, you must begin to respect us and see Africa in a different way,” Tshisekedi said. “You have to stop treating us and talking to us in a paternalistic tone. As if you were already absolutely right and we were not.”
On each of the stops Macron made on his trip he was met by demonstrations outside the French embassy with locals protesting against their colonialist past.
Part of the problem is that the EMs don't believe that the “values” espoused by the West are genuine, but merely
an excuse by the West to continue profiteering from such EMs.
And the West is compromised by commercial interests, as illustrated by the dispute over Ukraine’s grain exports in April. Poland, by far Ukraine’s most ardent supporter in Europe, banned imports of Ukrainian grain because
it had knocked the bottom out of
the local grain market, and its own powerful farm lobby was losing money. Moreover, the need to cut the Black Sea grain deal that was renewed in March was widely reported as necessary to avoid a global food crisis and famine in Africa. As bne IntelliNews reported, the bulk of Ukraine’s grain was sent to the EU, where it was sold cheaply to fulfil
commercial contracts, feed Spanish pigs or make biofuels. Only 17% of Ukraine’s exports went to Africa last year – a point not lost on the Kremlin.
"It is an open secret that the lion's
share of shipments are effectuated under commercial contracts in the interests of developed nations, while the deliveries of agricultural products to the poorest countries, which the White House is so vigorously concerned about in public, fell to a meagre 2.6%," the Russian Embassy in Washington said
in a statement in April, a fact that has been backed up by EU official export statistics.
The rise of the EMs and their insistence on more say in global politics is a dangerous situation. At the turn of
last century the rapidly industrialising Germany had similar complaints as
it pushed for more say against the diplomatic hegemony of Britain, at the height of its power, and France that dominated European politics. The two old war powers were unwilling to give, and that dispute resulted in WWI.
Today we find ourselves in frighteningly similar circumstances. The Nato involvement in the war is slowly escalating. In a recent interview with bne IntelliNews, Russian oligarch-turned- dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky said: “If we had given Ukraine all the weapons we have given them in the last year then this war would have been over in a week.”
A Ukrainian spring offensive is due in Ukraine soon and Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says that 98% of the military equipment promised to Ukraine “has been delivered”, including 230 tanks. If they are all thrown into the fray at once then Russia could receive a hammer blow, which the West is hoping will result in peace talks, but it could just as easily lead to further, and a much more serious, escalation. Until now the Western line has been that it is helping Ukraine to defend itself, but if Russia actually starts losing the war, the Kremlin could take the line that the West has changed from defence to offence – and that would constitute an attack by Nato on Russia. Then all bets are off.
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