As he looks back on the year since the Russian invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can draw satisfaction from his country’s performance on two fronts. In the battlefields of the east, his soldiers and generals have held out against a larger, better-armed enemy; in the West, he has routed his opposite number, Vladimir Putin, in the war of narratives.
Zelenskyy has kept the U.S. and Europe behind Ukraine, which has in turn given his military the morale and munitions it needs to keep Russia at bay. His personal charisma and adroit diplomacy helped to overcome early American and European reluctance to antagonize Putin and to extract ever more potent weapons from NATO nations. Western commitment to the Ukrainian cause was underlined recently by U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv.
But as he looks ahead to the second year of the conflict, the Ukrainian leader should direct more of his energies to a conspicuous gap in his communications campaign: the Global South. In most of the developing world, Ukraine has been unable to challenge Russia’s superiority in the war of narratives. Here, too, Kyiv will need some Western assistance — but it also has some powerful weapons of its own.