Help pressurise Putin to agree to a ceasefire, Ukraine urges African countries

Daily Maverick

15 hours ago

Under almost constant deadly bombardment by Russia, Ukraine has appealed to African countries to pressure Russia to agree to an unconditional ceasefire in the 40-month-old war.
Ukraine does not ask much from Africa. Mainly just more principled votes at the UN condemning Russia's invasion.
But now, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha has issued the ceasefire appeal through African journalists visiting Ukraine in a brief respite between concerted missile and drone attacks on the capital, Kyiv, and other cities.
He noted that Ukraine had accepted the US proposal for an unconditional, full ceasefire. 'Now we need to pressure Russia to say unconditional yes and to accept a ceasefire… That is why it is also important to support our peace efforts from your countries, from your capitals,' he told the journalists.
Just before we arrived in Kyiv on a study tour, hundreds of projectiles had hit the city on 17 June. A few days later we visited the epicentre of that attack, an apartment building in the Solomianskyi district, which had taken a direct missile hit, collapsing 32 apartments from the ninth floor to the ground floor, killing 23 civilians and injuring 27 more.
Workers were clearing rubble. They were joined by two boys, aged about 11 and wearing hard hats, who had volunteered to help their neighbours. An elderly woman sat on a bench in the grounds, quietly weeping.
Tsiupko Mykola, the deputy head of the local emergency services, said 13 surrounding buildings had also been damaged, including a kindergarten. So far none of the dead seemed to be children, 'but there are several unidentified bodies still', so they didn't know for sure.
Could the Russians have mistakenly hit this civilian target? He rolled his eyes. 'You can see with your own eyes it is a residential building that took a direct hit,' he said, adding that there were no military targets in the vicinity. Five more civilians died elsewhere in Kyiv that night.
Two days after we left Ukraine, Russia launched 352 drones, 11 ballistic and five cruise missiles, killing at least six civilians in Kyiv and one in Bila Tserkva. Then, on Sunday, 29 June, Ukraine suffered its largest Russian attack in a single night, when a barrage of 537 drones and missiles again hit Kyiv and several other cities, including some as distant from the front as Lviv in the far west of the country, which is rarely targeted.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think tank, said Russia had significantly ramped up its use of drones over the last nine months, 'increasing from approximately 200 launched per week to more than 1,000 per week by March 2025 as part of a sustained pressure campaign'.
The United Nations human rights office reported on Sunday that civilian casualties in Ukraine had increased by 37% from December 2024 to May 2025, compared to the same period the previous year, with 968 civilians killed and 4,807 injured. The majority of these casualties occurred in Ukrainian-controlled areas.
'The war in Ukraine — now in its fourth year — is becoming increasingly deadly for civilians,' said Danielle Bell, the head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
Unacceptable Russian demands
Ukraine's special envoy for the Middle East and Africa, Maksym Subkh, said it had been more than three months since Ukraine had offered an unconditional ceasefire, but Russia had not accepted the offer. In the last two rounds of direct negotiations in Istanbul in May and June, the Russians had put preconditions for negotiations that were completely unacceptable, said Subkh.
Apart from claiming the Ukrainian land they had occupied — and even some land still under Ukrainian control — Russia had insisted that Ukraine should not join Nato; it should not maintain strong and modern armed forces; it should destroy the weapons it had received from its Western partners to counter Russia's aggression; and it must adopt Russian as an official language.
Subkh said these demands showed that Russia was treating Ukraine as a colony, adding that Ukraine was experiencing the hardship and brutality African people had experienced during their colonisation. Meanwhile, Russia was continuing its constant shelling of Ukraine and 'the death toll is rising dramatically'.
He said the conditions that either side had should be discussed after the ceasefire, during negotiations.
He stressed that Ukraine remained determined to join the European Union and Nato, as it saw no other way of getting the security guarantees it needed for its protection.
EU membership
The EU ambassador to Ukraine, Katarina Mathernová, told us that the EU had had to step up its military support because at the start of the war Nato had 'armed Ukraine for defence, not victory', as the US feared a nuclear backlash.
And the EU — or at least almost all of it — remained committed to admitting Ukraine as a member. However, while Ukraine was rapidly fulfilling the many conditions required to join the EU, the EU was not in a position to accept it because one member state, Hungary, was blocking Ukraine's accession.
Mathernová said polls indicated that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's party might lose elections later this year, and so the objection to Ukraine joining the EU could fall away.
Foreign Minister Sybiha said that in the two rounds of direct peace talks in Istanbul this year, Russia had shown it was not serious by sending low-level delegations. Now it was time 'to engage all instruments of diplomacy … time for full diplomatic mobilisation'.
Apart from putting pressure on Russia to agree to an unconditional ceasefire, it was crucial that African countries should support Ukraine by backing resolutions at the UN General Assembly seeking an end to the war.
Sybiha was clearly referring to Ukraine's past disappointments that so many African countries — including South Africa — had abstained from UN General Assembly resolutions condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine and demanding that it withdraw its forces.
This was often because these countries had historical relations with the Soviet Union, although Subkh pointed out that Ukraine had also been part of the Soviet Union and many African leaders had been educated or received training in Ukraine.
Military support
Sybiha also sent a message to African leaders who had committed themselves to Russia, referring apparently mainly to those African countries which receive military support from the private military company Wagner, or its successor, the Africa Corps.
'Look at facts, first of all, and sooner or later you will get the bill,' said Sybiha.
'So that is why it is always important to diversify your relations with different parties. To diversify your security, to diversify your energy security, your food security.'
Subkh stressed that Ukraine had had good relations with Africa for a long time, and noted that it had intensified relations since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. Last year, it opened eight new embassies in Africa.
Mathernová said that after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia had switched the focus of its disinformation campaign away from Western countries and 'massively invested' in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The West underestimated the importance of this shift, 'because the imperialist nature of this war, the imperialist desire of Putin, was so obvious in our case.
'And looking at it from different parts of the world, it's not so obvious.
'And I must say that they are so, so, so much better, the Russians, at the game of disinformation, false narratives, coming up with using existing grievances and just multiplying and making them a lot bigger.'
Mathernová said Russia had switched its disinformation campaign to Africa, Asia and Latin America because it knew it would be successful internationally, as 'it's the West against the rest, right?'
Moscow's disinformation includes characterising the Ukraine government as neo-Nazi and accusing it of being a puppet of the West.
'People are exhausted'
In three visits to Ukraine — in November 2023, May 2024 and now June 2025 — I found that the Ukrainian people remained remarkably resilient in the face of unprovoked aggression, death and destruction.
But the growing strain of the war, amid the rising toll of death and destruction, had also become apparent.
Mathernová said the Ukrainian leadership was doing remarkably well.
'But people are exhausted, tired. They don't see a clear end.'
She noted that President Volodymyr Zelensky's popularity had ebbed and flowed, from 98% when the war started, down to about 50% and then to above 70% after US President Donald Trump called him a dictator in the White House earlier this year.
Nonetheless, she said, 'Ukrainians are knowingly by now facing a situation where there is no good and bad option. It's bad and worse options, right?
'I mean, that's the reality.'
She believes the war will end 'with a temporary loss of some territories, but a sovereign and independent Ukraine.'
For that to happen, an unconditional ceasefire is necessary very soon to stop the steady destruction of Ukraine and its people.
Yet we do not hear the South African government using its friendship with Russia to demand that it stop bombarding Ukraine so that peace negotiations may begin. DM
Peter Fabricius was visiting the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine on a journalists' study tour sponsored by those three governments.