HELMOED RÖMER HEITMAN: Friends like these hurt SA’s best interests

President Vladimir Putin has agreed to not attend the Brics summit in SA. That is good news, avoiding an unfortunate situation. But the infatuation with Russia still requires some reflection.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has stated in a sworn affidavit that “Russia has made it clear that arresting its sitting president would be a declaration of war”. That can only be interpreted as a threat, and that is not the behaviour of a friend. It is the behaviour of a gangster: “Rat on me to the cops and I will kill you and your family.” That is in line with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, its earlier aggression against Georgia and its brutal suppression of Chechnya. It should make it clear that Russia does not see SA as a friend. Friends do not threaten each other.

In April fellow Brics members Brazil, China and India voted in favour of the UN resolution titled “Aggression against Ukraine”, which defined Russa as aggressor and demanded the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine. So not only did 141 of 193 members of the General Assembly vote for that resolution, but so did all Brics members except Russia and SA.

Then in July both Hungary and Turkey agreed to allow Sweden to join Nato.

These developments should, one would think, finally wake up our government to the realities of this situation. Minister Naledi Pandor, of course, had it right at the beginning, calling on Russia to withdraw its forces from Ukraine. Unfortunately, the government quickly back-pedalled, seemingly believing that there are two sides to this war.

That is arrant nonsense. There are no two sides in a violent rape: there is the rapist and there is the victim. Nor are there two sides in a case of invasion with the intention to erase a country’s sovereignty and absorb its territory and people: there is the invader and there is the victim.

Invasion with the intent to erase is exactly what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Worse even than the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of opposition in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) or the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The opening phase of the latter saw special forces storming the president’s residence on December 27 1979 and shooting him, which approach Russia tried to replicate in Ukraine on February 24 2022.

Let us assume for argument’s sake that Russia is not lying when it claims oppression of Russian speakers in the Donbas. That, at a pinch, could be used to argue for occupation of those two oblasts but cannot justify subjugation and absorption of the whole of Ukraine or even just of the said Novorossiya that covers the southern third of Ukraine where more than 90% voted for separation from Russia in 1991. And given that 83% in the Donbas voted for an independent Ukraine in that year, the oppression claim is at least open to doubt.

Russia’s waffle about Nato enlargement is also just that: the East European countries asked to join Nato because they feared Russia, a fear nicely justified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So, what should SA’s stand be? We claim to be on the side of peace, so there is no rational choice but to unequivocally condemn the invasion. That does not mean declaring war on Russia, breaking off relations or necessarily enforcing all sanctions. It does mean standing up for Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent nation.

This is a matter of foreign policy, and it is wise to remember Lord Palmerston’s 1848 explanation of Britain’s policy: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” That may sound cynical but that is reality. There is no room in foreign policy or in strategy for sentiment except where it would have no impact. That is not the case here.

It is our government’s duty to focus on our interests, and specifically on our economic interests as it is the economy that underpins everything else.

Russia is economically irrelevant to SA. Exports to Russia in 2022 amounted to R283m, compared with R10.73bn to the US and R30bn to our major European trading partners.

In fact, Russia also comes behind Turkey, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Canada and Denmark in economic importance, none of them impressed with our dubious claim to being neutral. Russia also comes behind 11 trading partners in Asia, two of which are fellow Brics members that voted against Russia in April and two of which, Japan and South Korea, support Ukraine.

The same situation applies when considering investors in SA, with the UK the biggest (R658.8bn) followed by the Netherlands (R439.3bn), Belgium (R362.9bn), the US (R163.9bn) and Germany (R123.2bn). Other major investors are China (R114.2bn), Japan (R93.4bn) and Australia (R88bn). Russia, by contrast, stands at just $1.5bn (about R27.5bn).

A rational foreign policy requires maintaining cordial relations with our major trading partners and investors. It is entirely irrational to offend, even antagonise, them by seeming to support a country that is behaving brutally and that is of no economic relevance to us. That does not mean slavishly kowtowing. After all, we expressed opposition to the US’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was perfectly within our rights and which we did without drawing threats from Washington. Were we true to what we profess to believe, we would in fact be supporting Ukraine.

Instead, we choose to believe Russia’s propaganda. This may be due to the ANC’s visceral hatred of the US and “the West” (except when seeking favours), or it may be because the ANC believes it must stand by Russia as an old friend.

But what about Ukraine, which hosted many ANC members and was even then an independent country with a seat in the UN? And does anyone really believe that the Soviets and their subject states were promoting democracy when they built fences and walls to stop people fleeing their countries?

The reality is that the ANC was just another tool with which to annoy the West, and it is well past time it woke up to that reality and began to look out for SA’s interests rather than those of a state that chooses to threaten us when it is in difficulties.

• Heitman is an independent security and defence analyst.