Putin Smashes West's Hypocrisy on Ukraine and Gaza, Lays Bare Duplicity of US-led Order

President Putin took part in an extraordinary virtual G20 Summit hosted by India on Wednesday to discuss the crises in Ukraine and the Middle East, and factors standing in the way of effective global governance. Putin’s remarks highlight the differences in approach to world affairs by Russia and the United States, observers told Sputnik.

Vladimir Putin’s remarks at Wednesday’s G20’s extraordinary summit meeting focused heavily on issues of war and peace, with the Russian leader calling for a “consolidating approach” to international crises.

“Some of our colleagues here have mentioned that they are ‘shocked’ by ‘Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine’,” Putin said. “Indeed, military operations are always a tragedy for specific people, specific families, and the country as a whole. And we must certainly think about how to stop this tragedy. Russia has never refused to negotiate peace with Ukraine. It is not Russia, but Ukraine that has publicly announced that it is withdrawing from the negotiation process. Moreover, the country’s leader signed an executive order prohibiting such negotiations with Russia.”

“I understand that this war and the loss of life are shocking and could not be otherwise. But what about the bloody coup in Ukraine in 2014, which was followed by the Kiev regime’s war against its own people in the Donbass? Does that not shock you?” Putin asked. “Are you not shocked by the extermination of civilians in Palestine and the Gaza Strip today? Is it not shocking that doctors have to operate on children – do abdominal surgeries – and use a scalpel on a child’s body without anesthesia? Did it not shock you when the UN Secretary General said that Gaza has turned into a huge children’s cemetery?”

The world requires “collective, consensus-based decisions that reflect the views of the overwhelming majority of the international community, including both developed and developing countries,” Putin said, emphasizing that Russia will continue to do its part in working to ensure food and energy security, despite Western powers’ attempts to freeze Moscow out of the world economy.

Russia, Putin said, “advocates restoring the spirit of open and mutually beneficial international economic cooperation based on the UN Charter and the principles of collegial and mutually respectful joint work. It is important to achieve an effective optimization of the global economic governance system, in particular, to restart the World Trade Organization in its entirety, including its arbitration function.”

Exposing West’s Double Standards

America’s unbridled support for Israeli aggression in Gaza has reminded the Global South of the West’s “double standards” when it comes to the appraisal of international conflicts, and the emptiness of Washington’s rhetoric about a ‘rules-based international order,’ Dr. Anuradha Chenoy, a retired professor at the Center for Russian and Central Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Sputnik.

“Many countries in the Global South have made strong arguments on the double standards of the West on the question of human rights, humanitarian laws and international law. This critique, as we can see from the statements by Arab and Islamic countries’ leaders and many others like South Africa, has become sharper during Israel’s war on Palestine,” Dr. Chenoy said.

“The West has been complicit and supportive of Israeli actions and given Israel full impunity to carry out collective punishment on the Palestinian people, when they have denied food, water, and other basic facilities for days; to relentlessly bomb hospitals and civilian dwellings and infrastructure,” the academic emphasized.

Global South countries “can surely witness the contrast of Western discourse on human rights, humanitarian laws” when it comes to Israel’s violations of international law “as opposed to their sharp and often exaggerated and unverified discourse during the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Further, many countries of the Global South have themselves seen the West’s weaponization of human rights when they use it to intervene in the internal matters of various states,” Chenoy noted.

Unipolarity vs. Multipolarity

The academic pointed to Putin’s G20 speech as an example of the “great difference” between the way Moscow sees the concept of global governance, and the way President Biden and Washington use it.

“This starts from Biden’s attempts to retain a unipolar world where the US’s exclusive hegemony continues to prevail. This economic, political, military, hegemony is endorsed by the Western states. Putin on the other hand supports a multipolar world where there cannot be any one hegemon. This multipolarity in its very concept is inclusive and democratic, whereas unipolarity is exclusive, relies on military force and cannot be democratic,” Dr. Chenoy emphasized.

Accordingly, the scholar noted, the ‘rules-based international order’ being propagated by Washington and its allies is really an exercise of the US and the West defining and then deciding on the rules to the benefit of America’s national and geopolitical interests.

“For example, the West and Biden evade the issues of international humanitarian laws when it comes to Israel’s bombing civilians and collective punishment against Palestine. So this ‘rules-based order’, which is the basis of the Biden/Western conception of international governance, is in contrast with the multipolar and international law based vision proposed by Putin and those who support multipolarity,” the veteran academic said.

For his part, Dr. Raj Kumar Sharma, a senior research fellow at NatStrat, a New Delhi-based security and foreign affairs think tank, says that whatever issues take center stage at the G20, the key priority for the Global South is “peace,” as both the Ukrainian and Gaza crises have affected the developing world disproportionately. The Global South wants “the involved parties to negotiate at the table, not on the battlefield,” according to the observer.

“With the world’s top twenty economies sitting at the table, policy decisions taken by the G20 matter. There are many arguments against this platform, however, in the current governance structure at global level, the G20 carries a lot of weight and has the potential to address diverse socioeconomic problems faced by developed, developing and the least developed countries,” Dr. Sharma told Sputnik.