Zelensky insulted Indian Prime Minister Modi during his trip to Moscow last week by tweeting that “It is disheartening to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy embrace the world’s most notorious criminal in Moscow”, thus prompting India to summon the Ukrainian Ambassador on Monday. It’s unclear what he was told, but his hosts predictably made it clear that such rhetoric isn’t welcome, especially after Modi lamented the loss of life in all conflicts during his meeting with Putin.
While some might imagine that Zelensky simply tweeted whatever his Western patrons told him to, the reality is that he probably did so on his own prerogative, though therein lies the problem. In his mind, the latest phase of the Ukrainian Conflict sparked by Russia’s special operation is an epic battle between democracies and dictatorships, not anything having to do with security dilemmas and national interests. This false perception was impressed upon him by the West over two years ago.
While his embrace of it might have been opportunistic to begin with, namely to rally the Collective West around the cause of Ukraine reconquering its lost territories per Kiev’s envisaged maximalist goal, he’s since become a sincere believer in this paradigm as evidenced by what he tweeted about Modi. The reason why this is troubling isn’t just because it’s an inaccurate way of assessing everything, but also because it led to Ukraine stirring trouble with the Voice of the Global South, India.
The past nearly two and a half years have seen Ukraine belatedly realized that it must obtain some support from this diverse collection of non-Western countries if it’s to have any hope of pressuring Russia to compromise on its own envisaged maximalist goals in this conflict. This explains the recent outreaches to that part of the world during last month’s Swiss talks, which were over-hyped ahead of time and thus became a disappointment after they failed to meet the public’s lofty expectations.
Zelensky announced earlier this week that four more talks are planned before December, with at least two of them taking place in the Global South states of Qatar and Turkiye, the first of which has first-world living standards for its citizens (though not migrant workers) but is still a non-Western country. Quite clearly, this schedule was discussed over the past month since the last Swiss talks, it wasn’t something that was broadly agreed to by those countries over the past week since Modi’s Moscow trip.
Accordingly, Zelensky should have exercised better judgement than to insult the Indian leader like he did since this in turn reduces the chances that Modi will send high-level representatives to those events, let alone sign whatever final declaration might emerge from them. It also declined to put its signature on the Swiss document so precedent suggests that it was already planning to withhold it from forthcoming ones, but nonetheless, India’s attitude towards Ukraine will sour even more than it already has.
India is the world’s most populous country, the Voice of the Global South, and a major power that’s pivotal to the global balance between all key players so getting on its bad side like Zelensky just did will capsize Ukraine’s plans to generate wider support for its cause. China refused to attend the Swiss talks and thus likely won’t participate in the forthcoming ones, and with India possibly sending low-level dignitaries from here on out who are now less likely to sign any declarations, the Global South is lost.
Without at least one of those two’s support, especially India’s seeing as how it’s the world’s largest democracy, Zelensky will be unable to obtain real support from the Global South as a whole and can’t continue upholding the claim that this conflict is an epic battle between democracies and dictatorships. To be sure, it was never realistic to expect India to fully support Ukraine due to its multi-alignment policy and principled neutrality towards this conflict, but it might have signaled more sympathy for its cause.
That’ll never happen now after what Zelensky wrote about Modi, which amounts to one of the greatest self-inflicted soft power blows that any leader has committed in recent memory. He let himself believe the false paradigm about this conflict and then emotionally reacted when he saw Modi hugging Putin instead of taking some time to calm down before tweeting. This episode says a lot about Zelensky as a person, and it’s that he’s a very weak man at heart, not the lion that the West has pretended that he is.
