Are sanctions really hitting Russia and isolating Putin? A really satisfactory answer, perhaps, we will have it in a few months, but in the meantime things are not going exactly in the direction desired by the West. The BRICS summit, held in June in China, sanctioned a new form of non-alignment in the southern hemisphere which clearly shows that Russia's isolation is only Western. If we look just at the numbers, China and India have drastically increased their oil imports from Russia. In May, Beijing imported 800,000 barrels of Russian crude by sea every day, 40% more than in January, to which must be added what arrives through the pipeline.
From January to May, Russian oil imported from India went from zero to 700,000 barrels a day. The US asked New Delhi, the world's third largest consumer of black gold, not to "overdo it" with imports from Russia, but the Indian energy minister replied curtly that India cannot give it up.
Historians of the war in Ukraine will have great difficulty in explaining why Germany paid over ten billion dollars to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, followed by Italy and from the Netherlands with eight billion and from France with four billion. On the one hand, the West has imposed economic sanctions to punish Russian aggression, but on the other hand it has filled the aggressor’s coffers. From these figures emerge all the difficulties in sanctioning Russia.
None of the leaders of Brazil, China, India or South Africa - which together with Russia form the BRICS, an association with a geography and demography very alternative to the G-7 - has so far condemned Putin or imposed sanctions on Moscow. To find a reference to Ukraine in the final 75-point communiqué, it is necessary to go to the twenty-second where it claims to support "the talks between Russia and Ukraine", a declaration, obviously neutral and in line with the previous ones.
A non-alignment with the West that seems almost an "alignment" with Moscow. It is not surprising: in addition to the abstention of many states, especially African, on UN resolutions relating to Ukraine, no non-Western country has imposed sanctions on Russia. And among these we add Turkey, a NATO member, and Israel, the American buttress in the Middle East.
The countries of the southern hemisphere consider Russia as an aggressor only when the West asked, in the name of an international law that the US has systematically violated. The position of the Saudi regime is significant, not only has it not condemned Moscow but is focusing on OPEC +, the coordination with Russia on oil, and maintains the military agreement with Moscow signed in August 2021, defined as "strategic" by the Saudi Deputy Minister of Defense, prince Khalid bin Salman.
Turkey itself, an ally in NATO, is a amalgam of contradictions for the West. It supplies weapons to Kiev but also deals with Putin from whom it bought the S-400 anti-missile batteries. But it requires the F-16 fighters and to re-enter the F-35 program from which it was excluded. At the same time, it requires Sweden and Finland to extradite Kurdish militants in order to lift the veto on their entry into the Atlantic Alliance in return. This is a real blackmail done on the skin of the Kurds who were the best Western allies in the fight against the Islamic Caliphate. Furthermore, it is Ankara that sets the agenda in Libya and in the eastern Mediterranean, places where Italy would like to take home the gas lost in Russia but where it counts less and less. This is Turkey that offers itself as a mediator between Moscow and Kyiv and continues to do business with Putin.
In the Middle East and the global South they cannot stand the double language and rhetoric of the West. The United States, which with NATO bombed Serbia in 1999, Libya in 2011, invaded Afghanistan first (to abandon it to the Taliban in 2021) and then Iraq in 2003, are truly the most qualified to invoke respect for international law? The US also used cluster bombs, phosphorus and depleted uranium ammunition. While the crimes of the US army in Afghanistan (70,000 civilian deaths) and in Iraq have been widely documented without ever reaching any condemnation or sanction. Not to mention Palestine which has been occupied for decades with American support but which, unlike Ukraine, does not raise any international solidarity while Western governments continue to give Israel "carte blanche".