In the bustling open-air markets of Kumasi, in southern Ghana, the women who sell yam and maize do not spend their mornings parsing the tea leaves of Kremlin press conferences. They do not pore over leaked memos from the United States State Department. Instead, they look down at their ledgers, run their thumbs across worn banknotes, and make calculations that grow more terrifying by the month. A bag of nitrogen fertilizer that once cost a manageable sum now commands a month of savings; a modest tin of imported cooking oil requires a customer to walk away empty-handed. Long before a diplomatic cable is sent across the Atlantic, the ripples of European violence arrive at these stalls as hunger and debt.
So when news filters through that Vladimir Putin feels no urgent pressure to end his brutal assault on Ukraine, and that Washington’s diplomatic maneuvers offer little hope for a breakthrough, it lands not as abstract geopolitics, but as an ongoing sentence handed down to the rest of the world. In the halls of power in Moscow and Washington, "pressure" is measured in ballistic reserves, tactical territory, and domestic polling numbers. If the front line is frozen in the mud of the Donbas, Northern commentators describe it as a bloody stalemate. But for millions of smallholders, market vendors, and working families across the Global South, there is no stalemate. There is only an unrelenting economic siege.
To say that Moscow feels no pressure is to reveal the cynical insulation of imperial power. The Russian regime continues to fund its invasion through the extraction and export of fossil fuels and raw commodities, insulated by the very global market architectures that leave poorer nations vulnerable. Autocrats in fortified palaces do not skip meals when grain corridors close, nor do their children go without school fees when transport costs double. The war machine grinds on because the men who order it do not bear its true costs.
Yet Washington’s diplomatic approach has done precious little to alleviate this collective suffering. For two years, Western capitals have scolded Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for refusing to line up blindly behind their strategic objectives, lecturing leaders who must navigate historic ties, practical dependencies, and their own sovereign priorities. These same Western leaders announce hundreds of billions of dollars in military hardware with a stroke of a pen, even as they tell impoverished nations that there is simply no money available for systemic debt relief, climate loss and damage funds, or international grain reserves. The message could hardly be clearer: unlimited capital exists to fuel conflict, but austerity is the only prescription for those caught in its wake.
The economic reality is not an accident of nature; it is a direct consequence of how our global systems are structured. When the conflict drove up global energy and food prices, the central banks of the North responded by aggressively hiking interest rates to protect their own domestic currencies. That decision triggered massive capital flight out of developing economies, collapsing local currencies from Nairobi to Buenos Aires. Today, African nations spend more servicing external debts to private Western creditors and international financial institutions than they do on healthcare and education combined. We are forced to mortgage our children’s futures to absorb the shockwaves of an imperial war we never asked for.
This is why the diplomatic theater in the Global North feels so painfully detached from human reality. The communiqués that emerge from high-level summits are meticulously scrubbed of the people who suffer most. You will find endless paragraphs on deterrence, sovereignty, and strategic autonomy, but you will search in vain for any mention of the smallholder in Malawi whose soil goes unfertilized, or the garment worker in Bangladesh priced out of basic staples. The global majority is reduced to a footnote, treated as passive spectators rather than the primary casualties of Northern intransigence.
True peace will not come from waiting until Moscow runs out of young men to send to the front or until Washington decides the political timing is favorable for a summit. It requires a moral insistence that recognizes the shared vulnerability of our planet. It requires acknowledging that every week this war drags on, more sovereign budgets are crushed, more fertile land goes unplanted, and more families slip below the poverty line thousands of miles from the battlefield. The working people of the Global South have paid the bill for Europe’s wars for centuries. It is past time for their survival to be placed at the very center of the table.