There is a deep and growing rift between "the West" and "the Rest" about the need to resist and defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is because it is really a war in defence of sovereignty, which ought to be something every sovereign country can buy into -- but Western governments publicly insist that it is a war in defence of democracy.
All the chatter about democracy goes down well in Europe and North America, but it reeks of hypocrisy elsewhere. Three centuries of imperialism and conspicuous Western failures to defend democracy in the recent past and present in Africa, the Middle East and Asia make these claims sound absurd to people in the developing world.
So Brazil's President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva says in China two weeks ago that "the United States needs to stop encouraging war and start talking about peace" in Ukraine.
