Criticisms of Russia’s actions are relatively easy to find among foreign leaders, but when it comes to outright condemnations—much less endorsements of NATO’s position that the war was unprovoked and entirely Moscow’s fault—governments around the world demur.

In 1964, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the forerunner to the present-day African Union, declared at its Cairo summit that colonial borders would not be altered to reflect on-the-ground realities regarding ethnicity, language, and/or religion. With little debate, the OAU declared that the colonial boundaries of Africa, agreed to in far-away places like Berlin, Paris, London, and even the remote North Sea island of Heligoland, would serve as post-colonial international borders recognized by the United Nations and the tenets of international law. New states could only be carved out of old colonial entities if the post-colonial governments approved. Such approval would not come without a long and protracted armed fight.