This article in al-Jazeera discusses how president Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has managed to garner support from Saudi Arabia and the Arab League for his efforts in fighting against Russian invasion. While the bulk of Arab countries have remained neutral on the Russian-Ukranian war, Zelenskyy managed to elicit sympathies from Arab audiences. In particular, he made it a point to discuss the plight of the Muslim minority in Russian-occupied Crimea, “seeking to connect his nation’s struggle to wider Islamic sensitivities. The Crimean Peninsula is the ancestral homeland of the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic group of Sunni Muslims. Still, despite using language of “occupation” and “colonisers,” which sit well with audiences in the Global South, Zelenskyy did not go as far as refer to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Read the full article here.
