On the night of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, South African Defense Minister Thandi Modise attended a reception at the Russian Embassy in Pretoria, held in honor of the Russian armed forces. Four days later, officials from the ruling African National Congress, or ANC, celebrated 30 years of Russian-South African friendship over drinks at a reception held at the Russian consulate in Cape Town. Though both episodes are shocking, neither should come as a surprise.
South Africa’s foreign policy has been on a long, downward ethical trajectory since the Mandela era, when the promotion of democracy and human rights were viewed as benchmarks against which the country’s international engagements would be assessed. Even so, Pretoria’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 still represents a nadir in its post-1994 foreign policy.
South Africa’s initial response, delivered by the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, or DIRCO, was to condemn the invasion and urge a Russian withdrawal. However, according to media reports, President Cyril Ramaphosa quickly withdrew the statement and reassured the Russian ambassador that it did not accurately reflect Pretoria’s position.
Since then, all official government statements, as well as those of the ANC, have carefully avoided the use of terms like “aggression,” “invasion” or "war,” in an echo of the Russian state’s official line. Instead, they have confined themselves to bland calls for “restraint,” “deescalation” and a negotiated resolution. Ramaphosa himself has adopted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s language, referring to the war as “Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.” Based on these statements alone, South Africans would hardly know that the largest invasion of a European state since the 1940s was in progress.
Pretoria formally confirmed it intended to maintain neutrality on the issue on March 2, when it abstained from the vote on a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning the invasion and calling for a Russian withdrawal—a resolution supported by 141 member states, or 75 percent of the U.N.’s membership, with only 5 states voting against and 35 abstaining.
South African’s official explanation for its abstention was that the resolution failed to advance a diplomatic solution, and that Pretoria does not choose sides in international disputes—something belied by its partisan posture on both the Western Sahara and Israel-Palestine conflicts.
However, despite this professed neutrality, all government and ANC statements, with the exception of the original DIRCO declaration, have displayed an instinctive empathy with Russia. Lindiwe Zulu, the chair of the ANC’s international relations committee, made this explicit when she said, “Russia is our friend through and through.”
There are two principal explanations for South Africa’s policy on Ukraine. The first is its close bilateral relationship with Russia and its partnership with Russia and China more broadly within the BRICS forum comprising those three states along with Brazil and India. Pretoria’s foreign policy alignment on global issues that affect those states was the quid pro quo for South Africa’s admission to the group in 2011.
Despite a professed neutrality, the South African government’s and ANC’s statements have displayed an instinctive empathy with Russia.
The second explanation is the visceral anti-Westernism that still permeates the ANC and the broader ANC alliance. This is so deeply embedded in the organization’s political culture that it persists despite its negative implications for South Africa in areas like trade and economics. In 2018, for example, Ramaphosa laid out an ambitious target to secure $100 billion in investment over 5 years—the bulk of which is being sought from the West. But if South Africa’s domestic outlook had discouraged international investment before the Russian invasion, Ramaphosa’s defiance of the West’s position in what is likely to become a defining crisis for Europe will do little to advance the project. Unfortunately for the South African economy, such considerations appear to have been eclipsed by deep-seated ideological impulses.
In the wider ANC-led alliance, anti-Westernism is even more strident. The South African Communist Party, or SACP, pledged its support for Russia and claimed that the real aggressor in Ukraine was “U.S. imperialism” and the EU, which are “intimidating the whole world.” The SACP had a long history of dogmatic adherence to the Moscow party line during the communist era, and these ideological loyalties have now been seamlessly transferred to the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite its kleptocratic and reactionary character. Even discredited former President Jacob Zuma offered his unconditional support for Russia, describing Putin as a “man of peace.” This demonstrates the degree to which large sections of the ANC alliance remain mired in a Cold War-era ideological affinity with Moscow, despite the complex global political and economic shifts that have taken place since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Ukraine crisis has also confirmed that the ANC government is no longer concerned about promoting democratic values. Given the close political and ideological ties outlined above, the fact that the ANC instinctively supported Russia, an authoritarian state, over Ukraine, a democracy fighting for its survival, no longer surprises. However, the broader South African response to the crisis has weakened some of the key pillars of the country’s own foreign policy, and this is likely to prove detrimental to its interests in the future.
One, in particular, is worthy of close attention: South Africa’s supposedly robust commitment to peaceful conflict resolution and international law has been seriously undermined by its failure to condemn Russia’s flagrant aggression in Ukraine. Pretoria’s indulgence of Moscow serves only to normalize and legitimize the use of force in international relations and lowers the threshold for future acts of aggression, undermining the rules-based order Pretoria claims to uphold. Similarly, South Africa has placed great emphasis on state sovereignty over the past two decades, repeatedly using it as a justification for protecting authoritarian regimes—such as those in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, Belarus and Myanmar—from sanctions and U.N. censure. Yet when Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity was being trampled by an actual military invasion, the South African response was muted.
Pretoria’s conduct gives the strong impression that its expressions of outrage about the use of force against states are conditional upon the identity of the aggressor. If it is Russia or—should the occasion arise—China, then South African criticism will be subdued in contrast to its outright hostility toward the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the Western intervention in Libya in 2011. In this sense, contemporary South Africa fits comfortably into that global strain of “anti-imperialism” in which the actions of certain states are to be denounced, while the response to others is sanguine to the point of indifference.
These hypocrisies, and the selective application of principle, capture the inexorable moral decline of contemporary South Africa under the ANC. Pretoria must now decide if it wants to be a good international citizen and advocate rules-based order or if it will become one of the principal champions of a pariah state committing an unprovoked aggression and vast war crimes in Ukraine—but it is impossible for it to be both. The early signs are not encouraging.
James Hamill has been a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester since 1991. He has a long-standing research interest in South African politics, particularly in the country’s post-apartheid development, and is a frequent visitor to the country. He has published articles on South Africa in International Relations, Diplomacy & Statecraft, The World Today, Politikon: The South African Journal of Political Studies and The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.