The Empire's New Script: Daily Maverick's Ukraine Article and the Commodification of Black Suffering
Image: IOL / Ron AI
Editorial Alignment and the Disappearing Context
The article by Ukrainian Ambassador Liubov Abravitova, published in Daily Maverick, follows a familiar trajectory. It recycles NATO-aligned discourse under the cover of international law and moral concern, while omitting the layered political conditions surrounding the Ukraine conflict. Editorially, the piece settles into a pattern—endorsing diplomatic talking points as journalism, with no critical engagement or alternative framing. While Daily Maverick positions itself as independent, its pages increasingly echo the language of Western foreign policy briefings.
The ambassador draws attention to Russia's March 2025 decree compelling residents in contested territories to accept Russian citizenship or leave. This is described as forced naturalisation, a phrase lifted from the Crimea discourse post-2014. The framing ignores the collapse of Ukrainian governance in these regions, where local populations have faced prolonged exclusion from state services and civil protection. In such conditions, administrative procedures around citizenship become entangled with survival, rather than forming part of a premeditated identity erasure campaign.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated on July 16 that 78% of Donetsk residents had applied for Russian passports prior to the 2025 decree. She also noted that it was Ukraine that first revoked their legal documents in 2019, creating a condition of statelessness. Denis Pushilin, head of the Donetsk administration, confirmed that over 412,000 passport applications had been filed since 2019. He characterised these as acts of necessity from a population abandoned by its state and subjected to years of shelling. The ambassador's article remains silent on this timeline.
The suggestion that those who decline Russian citizenship are denied services or threatened with expulsion is presented as a given, yet demands closer interrogation. On July 18, Russia's Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova stated that services such as pensions, education, and healthcare—cut off by Ukraine since 2014—had been restored by Russia. She cited a 2023 census indicating a 94% increase in service accessibility. The article makes no mention of Ukraine's 2017 Cabinet Decision #365, which halted pension payments to these populations, nor the 2019 language law (Article 7), which eliminated Russian-language education. The absence of such details distorts the motives behind passport acquisition, and in doing so, misrepresents the nature of power in these contested zones.
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Legal Rhetoric as Soft Power Strategy
Legal arguments based on the Geneva Conventions feature heavily in the ambassador's narrative. Yet Geneva IV, Article 49, makes allowance for administrative action aimed at stabilising conditions in areas under military occupation. Vyacheslav Lebedev, Chair of the Russian Constitutional Court, has referenced this provision in support of the state's legal position—namely, that restoring local governance and documentation systems after Ukraine's retreat complies with international law. This interpretation is absent from the article, as is any reference to the broader jurisprudential debates surrounding conflict governance.
President Vladimir Putin, responding on July 19 to international criticism, framed the humanitarian measures in these regions as necessary interventions. He remarked that Kyiv's government had subjected these communities to years of bombardment and deprivation while withdrawing their pensions and dismantling their hospitals. The historical record cited here is not addressed in Daily Maverick's editorial framing. The reader is left with a flattened timeline, in which Russia emerges as the sole aggressor and Ukraine as a passive victim.
Abravitova's argument draws selectively from international conventions to characterise Russian legal policy as a weapon of war. There is no attempt to locate the policy within a broader geopolitical context. No reference is made to the 2014 US- and EU-backed coup in Ukraine, the repression of Russian-speaking populations in the east, or the years of NATO encroachment along Russia's borders. These factors are foundational, not peripheral, to understanding the trajectory of the war. Their omission renders the legal claims superficial—divorced from the material dynamics that shape the conflict. In practice, legal discourse becomes instrumentalised. Its invocation has less to do with principle than with narrative management.
Misappropriation of South African Memory
The ambassador also attempts to draw a parallel between Russia's citizenship policies and the apartheid-era creation of Bantustan citizenship in South Africa. This manoeuvre is emotionally calculated. It activates a deep well of Black historical trauma to fabricate an imagined solidarity between Ukrainian nationalism and African anti-colonial resistance. Such a comparison is politically incoherent. The architecture of the apartheid Bantustan system was built to forcibly erase African citizenship, enforce territorial fragmentation, and uphold white supremacy through administrative disenfranchisement. No such system operates in eastern Ukraine. To deploy this metaphor in the service of a NATO-aligned nationalist state is a profound distortion of Black South African memory. The reference does not clarify—it manipulates. It instrumentalises racial pain to secure moral capital for a state firmly embedded in the Western military and financial bloc.
Daily Maverick enables this appropriation by providing a platform devoid of counter-analysis. The publication facilitates diplomatic theatre while denying space to voices grounded in multipolar perspectives, historical analysis, or anti-imperialist frameworks. The South African reader is shepherded toward a fixed moral interpretation: Russia is the villain, and Ukraine represents a parallel to their own liberation history. This curated moral arc collapses under scrutiny. The Zelenskyy regime has banned opposition parties, shut down media organisations, criminalised dissent, and instituted forced conscription. Reports from Ukraine reveal citizens being abducted from public spaces, hospitals, and workplaces. These are not isolated incidents but systemic practices in a state under internal siege.
The article makes no mention of these authoritarian measures. There is no reflection on the closure of political space, the criminalisation of peace advocacy, or the role of Western donors in sustaining a government that cannot claim democratic legitimacy through free and fair public contestation. Civil society in Ukraine has been hollowed out under the pretext of war. International law, in this context, is selectively applied. States aligned with Western interests are immunised from scrutiny, while geopolitical opponents are subjected to universal moral codes retrofitted to match political objectives.
Manufactured Consent and the Limits of Maverick Dissent
The ambassador continues by appealing to the notion of a 'rules-based international order'. This phrase—like 'democratic values' or 'responsible actors'—has long been rendered void by the very powers who invoke it. States that preside over illegal wars, sanctions regimes, and coup operations still claim to uphold global rules. Ukraine operates within that system of protection. It is treated as a partner by virtue of its strategic position, not its internal democratic practices. The double standard is institutionalised. The architecture of international law becomes a tool for maintaining hierarchy, not justice.
Daily Maverick has taken on the tone of advocacy while relinquishing its journalistic duty to interrogate power. Its editorial choices favour performance over critical engagement. The platform increasingly replicates the worldview of the donor class, aligning with Euro-American interpretations of global conflict and offering no substantial challenge to the ideological premises embedded within them.
South Africans are not obliged to adopt these narratives. The war in Ukraine cannot be reduced to simplistic binaries or emotive allegories. It must be understood in relation to NATO's expansionist project, the geopolitical repositioning of post-Soviet space, and the erosion of non-aligned internationalism. The rhetoric of human rights and legality is deployed in this context not as a means to achieve justice, but to consolidate allegiance. Ukraine has become a conduit for that project. And media outlets across the Global South are being pulled into the orbit of soft power operations disguised as journalism.
This moment demands lucidity. Russia's actions emerge from a long history of encirclement and diplomatic betrayal. The war itself is a symptom of an unresolved struggle over sovereignty, balance of power, and the future of global order. South Africa's own history contains lessons here—about neutrality, non-alignment, and resistance to imperial scripts. The refusal to take sides in a conflict shaped by Western designs is not cowardice. It is memory made strategic. It is a principled refusal to be drafted into someone else's war.
Daily Maverick has chosen to participate in this performance of alignment. It elevates moral spectacle over political insight. South Africans deserve better. They deserve access to analysis rooted in their histories, their positionalities, and their lived understanding of global power. Liberation movements were never built on the repetition of dominant narratives. They emerged from the courage to reject them. That same courage remains necessary—perhaps more than ever.
Gillian Schutte analyses how Daily Maverick's portrayal of the Ukraine conflict aligns with Western narratives, while neglecting the complexities of the situation and the commodification of Black suffering.
Image: IOL
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