Vladimir Putin still has lots of friends: How Turkey, India and South Africa just gave him a boost

Tom Nagorski

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It’s easy sometimes to believe that the world stands squarely with Ukraine — when its president makes a dramatic trip to Washington, when Russia’s president comes in for withering criticism in his own country or when the most vigorous debates in Washington and Brussels are about how many billions of dollars — or advanced weapons systems — the world should give to Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his resistance fighters.

But almost since the war began, there have been regular reminders of a basic geopolitical truth: Vladimir Putin and his country still have lots of friends.

The past few days have brought several examples of this: Turkey’s defiant rejection of a proposed expansion of NATO, South Africa’s welcome mat for a senior Russian delegation and its planned military exercises with the Russians, and a new accounting of just how much Russian oil India has purchased since Putin invaded Ukraine.

On the one hand, these stories have nothing in common; the specific issues are different, as are the motives each country has for its actions.

But in another way, they have everything to do with one another. All three are directly related to the war and to an ambivalence about the Ukrainian cause. And taken together, these developments have made this a relatively good week for Vladimir Putin.

In the days following the Russian invasion, President Joe Biden was blunt: “We will make sure that Putin will be a pariah on the international stage.” Various European leaders made similar statements. Liz Truss, then the British foreign secretary, told the Atlantic Council in March 2022: “Putin is shunned and isolated.”

In some ways he has been. The global condemnations and Western sanctions have piled up, and poor results on the battlefield have hurt Putin at home. But even now, after nearly a year of Russian aggression and atrocities in Ukraine, the global divisions persist. China’s President Xi Jinping continues to nurture his “no limits” friendship with Putin. Brazil’s new president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been quoted as saying that “people are stimulating hate against Putin” and that if Zelenskyy “didn’t want war, he would have negotiated a little more.”

And in just the last few days, those three nations named above — all of which the U.S. counts as allies — offered reminders that turning Putin into a “pariah” is as complicated a mission as the war itself.

Turkey: a NATO nation stiffs the rest of NATO

Each of these latest examples starts with an apparent puzzle. In the first case, it goes like this: Wait, isn’t Turkey a NATO ally?

Indeed it is. And in some important ways, Turkey has stood firmly with the rest of the NATO alliance against Putin. The most profound example of this was its sale of low-cost Bayraktar drones that were used to devastating effect against Russian forces in the war’s early days — so much so that Ukrainian songs were written about the weapon, and Ukrainians themselves began naming their pets “Bayraktar.”

But all along, as Grid’s Nikhil Kumar reported recently, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has played a classic geopolitical balancing act when it comes to the war. Turkey never sanctioned Russia, nor has it closed its airspace to Russian aircraft. And this week Erdogan sounded like a friend of the Kremlin when he vowed that Sweden wouldn’t be getting his country’s support for NATO membership.

It’s a major development, and a highly unwelcome one for the West. Sweden applied to join the alliance last year, along with Finland; away from the frontlines, there was no more significant consequence of the war when it came to the European map. Two nations with famously neutral positions were casting their lots with NATO and making a clear statement of their antipathy toward Moscow. For Putin, who had claimed the war was needed to rein in NATO expansion, it was the equivalent of a geopolitical body blow.

And this week, in Ankara, a NATO nation was saying, effectively, it’s not going to happen.

New entrants to the alliance must be approved by all members, so Erdogan and Turkey hold an effective veto. Erdogan has complained about Sweden’s lenient treatment of Kurdish residents of the country whom the Turks consider terrorists. Turkish demands that Sweden change its laws to allow extradition of those Kurds have gone nowhere, and last weekend, a Quran was burned at an anti-Turkey protest in Stockholm. Erdogan had apparently had enough. “Sweden should not expect support from us for NATO,” he said Monday.

Beyond Sweden’s fate, the whole episode is an off-script note in what has been one of the most important narratives of the war: NATO unity. Putin had clearly counted on disunity, probably imagining fissures between the U.S. and some of the European members. He didn’t get that, by a long shot, but now he has won an important division within NATO. And he can thank Erdogan for that.

In South Africa, history intrudes

A friend asks: What is South Africa up to?

There is a perception among some Americans of South Africa as a darling of democratic change and beacon of moral action. After all, it’s the nation that managed to overthrow white minority rule and bring Nelson Mandela to power.

So — to the friend’s question — what were the South Africans doing this week welcoming Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to Pretoria and announcing military exercises with Russia? (Actually, exercises with Russia and China, to be held in mid-February.)

The answer to this one has much to do with history, dating to the time when apartheid was the law of the land in South Africa and Mandela was still a prisoner on Robben Island.

In those days, Moscow had close ties to the African National Congress, when the ANC was opposing white minority rule, and when the U.S. was — putting it mildly — slow to break ties with South Africa’s white rulers. Back then the U.S. branded the ANC a terrorist organization.

If that seems like ancient history, consider that South Africa’s current President, Cyril Ramaphosa, was the ANC’s chief negotiator in the talks that ended apartheid rule. Today he serves as the organization’s leader.

Other countries have stood with Russia for purely economic reasons; they need Russia’s grain, oil or revenues that come from bilateral trade. South Africa has only minimal financial ties with Russia. What it has is that history, along with a long-standing view that American hegemony has had its day, and alternatives are to be welcomed.

This week South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor said her country would support Russia in pushing for “a redesigned global order.” This of course dovetails with the Russian and Chinese views that they ought to play leading roles in a new world order — at the expense of U.S. influence.

Where does this leave Ukraine?

The South Africans have been trying to downplay the military exercises and the Lavrov visit. Standing with Lavrov in Pretoria, Foreign Minister Pandor said “all countries conduct military exercises with friends worldwide. It’s the natural course of relations.” For his part, Ramaphosa says often that South Africa is an impartial party to the war and stands ready to mediate between the two sides.

But all this can only sting in Washington. This week’s visit gave Lavrov another global platform from which to blame the Ukrainians for the war; and while Lavrov was there, Pandor made no mention of Russian aggression or atrocities. And it won’t help that on Feb. 24, the one-year anniversary of the war, the presumptively neutral South Africans will be holding military exercises with Russia and China.

“The United States has concerns about any country … exercising with Russia as Russia wages a brutal war against Ukraine,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday.

The U.S. is clearly trying to repair the relationship — with South Africa and with the entire continent. President Biden hosted a U.S.-Africa summit last month, and a day after Lavrov’s visit, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen landed in South Africa. Given the history, and damage done during the Trump administration (beyond a general disengaging with Africa, Trump’s own racist comments about the continent were circulated widely), the repair job may last as long as the war itself.

In India, money and energy

When it comes to India, the puzzle goes like this: Isn’t the U.S. strengthening its ties with India as a hedge against China?

Well, yes. Yes, but …

Unlike the Turkish and South African examples, India’s support of Russia is all about the bottom line. And Indian leaders haven’t been shy about saying so.

The recent headlines about India and Russia — first reported by Bloomberg — came with a staggering bit of data: India is currently buying 1.2 million barrels of Russian oil a month — or 33 times as much Russian oil than it did at this time last year.

As the west sanctions Russia in different ways, and many European nations do what they can to wean themselves off Russian oil and gas, India has been rushing to buy Russian oil. A consequence of the sanctions and price caps imposed by the European Union is that Russia now has far fewer customers for its oil — and that in turn means it’s a buyer’s market. Enter India, the world’s third-largest crude-oil importer, which is now almost certainly, as Bloomberg put it, getting an “attractive discount.”

Like the leaders of Turkey and South Africa, Indian officials have said they are not taking sides and stand ready to mediate. But in the meantime, the India-Russia arrangement is a winner for both parties: India gets lots of cheap energy, and Russia gets a big chunk of badly needed revenue, along with the knowledge that one of the world’s largest and most important countries has no problem doing deals with Russia.

Beyond the cheap oil, India — again, like Turkey and South Africa — has a history with Moscow, a relationship that dates to the Soviet era. Around 60 percent of India’s military hardware comes from Russia. India abstained in the initial anti-Russia resolutions at the United Nations.

In November, foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar traveled to Moscow with a delegation comprising senior officials involved in India’s oil and gas industries. He was clear about his country’s approach: “We have seen that the India-Russia relationship has worked to our advantage, so if it works to my advantage, I would like to keep that going.”

Friends, enemies and frenemies

None of these developments have attracted anything like the news from Berlin and other European capitals about the fate of the German “Leopard” tanks, which will now, after a tortured debate, be making their way to Ukraine. In terms of the current course of the war, that’s big news. But these other developments, far from the battlefield, shouldn’t be ignored.

And chances are that there will be more reminders that “Stand With Ukraine” is a far more popular cause in the U.S. and Europe than in many other parts of the world. Perhaps it goes without saying, but nations tend to act to safeguard their own interests — and nations don’t like to be pushed around. Especially not those like the ones cited here, which are large and influential players in their respective regions. And so, for the foreseeable future, these and other countries may continue to provide occasional shots in the arm for Putin — and cause for frustration in the West.

As for Vladimir Putin, he needs all the help he can get. There’s nothing enviable about his current circumstances. And as Stanislaw Kucher reported for Grid earlier this week, there is now an active conversation among Russian experts about a “life after Putin.” But there’s a line from another Grid story that fits here, even though Nikhil Kumar wrote these words last April. Kumar was referring to what Truss, the former U.K. foreign secretary, had said about Putin:

“Given the money still pouring in, the countries lining up with the Kremlin — or at least refusing to join in the criticism — the second part of her (Truss’) statement, that ‘Putin has made his country a global pariah,’ does not apply. At least not yet.”

Nine months later, Putin still has his friends.

Thanks to Brett Zach for copy editing this article.