El Salvador joins the orbit of the Kremlin along with Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia by abstaining
Only four countries supported Russia on Wednesday in the vote on the UN General Assembly resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine, declaring it contrary to the organization’s purposes of resolving disputes, and demanding the complete and unconditional withdrawal of the troops. These are the usual suspects: Belarus, Syria, North Korea and Eritrea. That turned the historic resolution into an overwhelming condemnation of the world, which deplores the aggression “in the strongest possible terms,” the text says.
All the Kremlin propaganda has failed to fool any government. The condemnation of the United Arab Emirates, current president of the UN Security Council, was surprising, which last Friday refrained from condemning Russia in a similar resolution of the Security Council. That suggests that time is on Ukraine’s side, because what little support Russia has among its allies is cracking as public outrage grows.
There was, however, a significant handful of abstentions in which Russia’s influence in the world and the strategies of its rulers could be read as if on a map. Among the 35 countries that supported Moscow with their tacit silence, wrapped in the form of abstention, two powers such as China and India stood out, followed by a bunch of countries in Asia and Africa under their area of influence, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran, to name a few of the Asians, or South Africa, Algeria, Angola, Congo, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
In Latin America, Mexico, whose president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has refused to join the sanctions, voted in favor of the condemnation resolution, but the new leftist government in Honduras, led by Xiomara Castro, preferred to team up with traditional allies from Moscow that have abstained -Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua-, which says a lot about what the ideological club will be in the coming years.
If Venezuela was missing from that bouquet, it is only because the country of Nicolás Maduro has lost the right to vote in the organization for not paying its dues. At the cost of the sacrifice of the Ukrainian people, the economic debacle that Russia will suffer with the isolation and sanctions, extended this Wednesday in the Defense sector, could have the unexpected benefit of cutting off the flow of Russian assistance to the autocratic regimes it supports in the world. Some of them -such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela- are already in a coma, so the Russian crash could have a boomerang effect on their satellites.