JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (CNN) – As the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine approaches, this weekend a Russian warship armed with one of Moscow’s most powerful weapons entered a port on South Africa’s east coast.
The Admiral Gorshkov frigate — which President Putin says carries hypersonic Zircon missiles — has a “Z” and “V” painted roughly white on its blackened funnel, just like the Russian tanks and artillery pieces that rolled into Ukraine a year ago.
It is taking part in a 10-day naval exercise in the Indian Ocean alongside South African and Chinese warships, war games South Africa says have been planning for a long time.
But the timing of the drills has privately outraged and publicly critical Western diplomats, and they risk an embarrassing backlash for the Pretoria government.
“The timing of these drills is particularly unfortunate and will draw the world’s attention to South Africa during the anniversary of the war. I don’t think western nations will let this exercise get away,” said Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Program at the South African Institute of International Affairs.
“It is very disturbing that South Africa is staging a military exercise with the country – an aggressor, an invader – using its military might against a peaceful country, bringing destruction and trying to eliminate the Ukrainian nation,” said Liubov Abravitova, Ambassador of Ukraine in southern Africa.
On the basis of realpolitik alone, it may have seemed wiser to freeze Russia, or at least postpone naval exercises.
Ukraine’s biggest supporters, the United States and European Union countries, are also major trading partners for South Africa.
The two-way trade of the European Union and the US with South Africa far outstrips Russian economic relations. And while Russia promises more trade deals, its struggling economy is unlikely to provide the direct investment South Africa desperately needs.
South African officials also point to drills conducted with the French and US militaries in recent years.
Demonstrators demonstrate in Cape Town on February 17, 2023 against South Africa’s 10-day joint military exercise with Russia and China.
Cold War Allies
But ties between South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) and Moscow run deep — and they won’t be easily broken.
“By default, we are on the side of Russia. And for us Ukraine, what we call a sell-off. It’s a sell-out to the West,” Obey Mabena, a veteran of the ANC’s armed wing, said in an interview with CNN last year.
Although Mabena represents neither the government nor the ANC, his opinion is likely to be shared by more than a few ANC supporters.
Mabena fled South Africa in the 1970s, like many of his generation, displaced by the police brutality of South African apartheid. In exile, many South African youth joined the armed wing of liberation movements such as the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress.
There were often Soviet advisers in their training camps in other African countries.
“We realized that there was a country like the Soviet bloc that was willing to give us anything we needed. Give us food, they gave us uniforms, they educated us, they gave us guns,” Mabena said. “For the first time we encountered white people who treated us as equals.”
Liberation fighters and politicians have very different experiences with the West. It was not until the mid-1980s, decades after the apartheid regime came to power, that the US government backed sweeping economic sanctions.
Anti-apartheid activist and South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, was on a terror watch list until 2008 – a holdover from the Cold War. Many ANC members are convinced that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in Mandela’s capture, which has never been proven.
Of course, many of the ANC cadres went to Soviet-era Ukraine for their education and training.
And the anti-apartheid movement had some of its most powerful allies in the United States. In Congress, then-Senator Joe Biden is known to have berated Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State for supporting the white South African government.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (left) and his South African counterpart Naledi Pandor meet in Pretoria January 23, 2023.
Negotiations, not guns
In recent years, South Africa’s ties with Russia have only deepened with the formation of BRICS, the economic and diplomatic partnership between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
A withdrawal from the joint naval exercises would have been an insult to Russia, but probably also to the much more important economic partner China.
South Africa’s chief diplomat called some of the criticism of the naval exercises a “double standard”.
Like several African nations, South Africa abstained in UN General Assembly votes condemning the Russian invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territory.
“The answer we got is you can take it or leave it. And in the face of that arrogance, we thought the only decision we could make was to abstain,” Naledi Pandor, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, told CNN in June.
She claims that the goal for the world community should be a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine under the authority of the United Nations. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has offered to mediate in these talks.
Neither side took up the offer. But South Africa’s stance on the war has hardly frozen the country. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other senior US diplomats have visited South Africa since the beginning of the war.
Perhaps with history in mind, America’s top diplomats are careful not to criticize South Africa by name.
But if South African officials believe their stance is the pragmatic approach, it is difficult to argue that it is the moral one. Certainly with a pedigree of moral giants like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu – the late Archbishop of Cape Town whose foundation said this is no time to “sit on the fence”.
Pretoria could come under even greater criticism if Russia is rumored to test-fire a hypersonic Zircon missile from the frigate Admiral Gorshkov during naval exercises.
The missiles are long-range weapons that travel at more than five times the speed of sound and are harder to detect and intercept than other missiles.
Putin has previously boasted about it. “There are no analogues in any country in the world,” he said, according to TASS. “I am sure that such powerful weapons will reliably protect Russia from potential external threats and help protect our country’s national interests,” he added.
Displaying them at the joint exercises could become another propaganda highlight for the Russian head of state, whose weapons in the Ukraine war did not live up to expectations.
And by assiduously remaining “neutral,” South Africa could give Putin a significant victory on the anniversary of the war.
“You will milk this. Russia will use this as a propaganda tool and the message is: ‘We have friends, we work together,'” Gruzd said.