Comfort Ero, the president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, discusses what the United States and Europe get wrong about global attitudes toward Russia’s war in Ukraine for Foreign Policy.

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last February, commentators in Europe and the United States have lamented that few countries outside the West have offered Kyiv real backing. A common question posed to me in the last year is why so many countries have sat this one out. Indeed, politicians and diplomats in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have offered Ukraine limited support and suggested the West is in part to blame for Russia’s war.

At first glance, it may seem that a large part of the world is slipping away from the West—at best adopting a neutral position and at worst tilting toward Russia and China. But that depiction is simplistic: It fails to understand the origins of non-Western positions toward Russia’s war in Ukraine and threatens to create the rift between the so-called West and the rest that some commentators complain about. Ukraine, the United States, and their partners will be best positioned to attract and keep non-Western countries onside if they first understand what motivates them.

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