When Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Sybiha, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot presented a joint declaration on the war in New York this week, it was meant as a show of solidarity. What is actually showed was how far the solidarity with Ukraine has narrowed to a hard core of Global North supporters.

The statement came ahead of a high-level Security Council briefing on Ukraine during the 81st session of the UN General Assembly. It was signed by 51 countries: "We stand with Ukraine and support it in confronting Russian aggression. As early as March 2025, Ukraine agreed to a full, immediate and unconditional ceasefire. We call on Russia to finally do the same."

The 51 signatories demanded that Moscow accept an immediate ceasefire and enter meaningful negotiations. They called for the "immediate, safe, unconditional return" of Ukrainian civilians who had been illegally detained or deported, with particular stress on children. They also backed protection for freedom of navigation and commercial shipping in the Black Sea.

"Russia is trying to choke off Ukrainian grain exports, thus jeopardising global food security," Kallas said. "We therefore support efforts towards an arrangement in the Black Sea to safeguard freedom of navigation."

The list of who signed matters as much as the text. Most signatories are European. Beyond Europe there are a scattering of rich countries aligned with the G7: Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, and from Latin America only Costa Rica, Honduras and Panama. Not a single African country signed. Nor did any Arab state, nor anyone from South or Southeast Asia. The US, which organised the Western response to Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, was also absent again.

That is a long way from March 2022, when 141 of the UN's 193 members voted to condemn the invasion. The same number backed a similar resolution on the first anniversary in February 2023.

From 141 to 93

Support for Ukraine is falling away as Ukraine fatigue  builds up again. By the third anniversary, in February 2025, a Ukrainian-European resolution received only 93 votes in favour, with 18 against and 65 abstentions. The US was among those voting against, remarkably putting it on the same side as Russia. That can be marked down to a “Trump effect” who took over from US President Joe Biden and has backed Putin’s line from the beginning in the hope of doing business with Russia.

This February the picture was more mixed. A resolution titled "Support for lasting peace in Ukraine" passed with 107 votes in favour, 12 against and 51 abstentions. The US abstained, and 23 states did not vote at all. Washington had tried to delete the references to Ukraine's "sovereignty" and "territorial integrity". That motion failed, with 11 in favour, 69 against and 62 abstaining.

Tammy Bruce, the US deputy permanent representative, said the language would "distract from ongoing negotiations, rather than support discussion of the full range of diplomatic avenues". Ukraine's deputy foreign minister Mariana Betsa replied that removing it would send "a very dangerous signal that these fundamental principles are up for discussion".

The 12 votes against came from Russia and its old friends in the CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) as well as affiliated rogue nations like Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, Eritrea and Burundi, plus the three military governments of the Sahel: Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The countries that abstained carry more weight – including the core BRIC nations India and Brazil. Economic allies in Central Asia like Kazakhstan, as well as all the Gulf monarchies abstained: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman.

The International Crisis Group said in an analysis that the vote showed "a large part of the UN membership still sees Russia's war in Ukraine as an attack on core UN Charter principles, including sovereignty and non-aggression, and is willing to say so". It also noted that nearly all Arab states had moved away from their 2022–23 positions, partly out of frustration with how the West responded to the war in Gaza and more recently the failure of the old world powers to delliever on their promise of peace and stability. Suddenly raw power plays a more important role and Russia has plenty of that while the increasingly abandoned Ukraine does not.

Russian commentators see a different trend. Oleg Barabanov, programme director at the Kremlin-friendly Valdai Discussion Club, noted that the 2026 text had been stripped of much of its confrontational language. "The more neutrally worded the draft resolution prepared by Ukraine, the greater the number of votes it receives," he wrote. Russia's foreign ministry said the debate "clearly demonstrate[s] the international community's fatigue with the Ukrainian situation". It added that "Kyiv and its backers have ended up with a rather lacklustre voting record".

Economics over ideology

Research suggests the Global South's reluctance has more to do with self-interest than with sympathy for Moscow – another lesson that the Global South has gleaned from watching the West, which has constantly watered down sanctions or added calve outs to allow its own companies to make money from Russia. The gutting of the 21^st sanctions package to allow Greek tankers to continue to work for Russia’s shadow fleet one of the more egregious examples.

 A 2023 study by Alessia Amighini and Alicia García-Herrero for Bruegel, the Brussels think-tank, found that the strongest predictor of a country abstaining or voting against Ukraine was how much it imported from Russia. Defence ties with Moscow, Russian state aid and membership of China's Belt and Road Initiative also made abstention more likely.

Brazil is typical of the hedgers. Speaking to the General Assembly on September 22, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said there would be "no winners on the battlefield" and that "we are all held hostage by the inaction of the Security Council". Lula has promoted a "Group of Friends for Peace" with China, a bloc of developing countries that argues for a negotiated settlement. Western capitals complain that the group avoids saying who started the war.

India, which still depends heavily on Russian oil and military equipment, presents itself as a bridge between camps. But New Delhi has resolutely refused to honour the Western sanctions and Putin is a regular visitor to New Delhi where he is fêted as a key strategic partner.

Washington's shifting role

The US absence from this week's statement fits the Trump administration's preference for direct deals with both sides over coalition diplomacy. On September 23, secretary of state Marco Rubio met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the assembly. According to the State Department, they discussed "the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Russia bilateral relationship".

Trump has said a deal could come "more quickly than people understand". "We're working very closely with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, and we will get that one done," he said. He also said: "This ridiculous and never-ending war with Ukraine must be ended. The whole world suffers as 25,000 people, mostly soldiers, are being killed each month."

Moscow shows no sign of agreeing to a truce. "We are not going to have a pause in our special military operation," Lavrov told the Security Council on Wednesday. He accused Europe of wanting a halt in the fighting in order to "pump the Kyiv regime with weapons".

But Putin continues to play hardball. As the declaration was being presented in New York, Russia launched another large wave of strikes across Ukraine, killing at least two people and injuring more than 40.

"While the 81st session of the UN General Assembly is focused on peace efforts and diplomacy to end the war, Ukraine is once again under a massive Russian attack," Sybiha said. He called for tougher sanctions and more air-defence interceptors, adding: "These attacks must not become the new normal."

In his own speech to the assembly, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Moscow was paying for its slow advance with "248 lives for every square kilometre" in the first eight months of this year. He said Vladimir Putin was claiming for "the 17th or 18th time in five years" that he needed only a few more months, while aiming at "Odesa and Kharkiv, Dnipro and others". "Patient Zero must be stopped," he said. "Russia's revenues must remain a target."

The statement was an attempt by European to close ranks behind Ukraine and is more united than it was a year ago. Hungary, which for years under Viktor Orbán blocked or diluted EU measures against Moscow, signed this week's declaration. Last month the new government of Péter Magyar signed a UN document stating that "Russia's behaviour is a threat to Hungary, Europe, and the global order". It also said: "Hungary condemns Russian military aggression and fully supports Ukraine's sovereignty and its territorial integrity within the internationally recognised borders." Georgia also signed.

But Europe is now more united as a smaller group. Under Biden it was the EU, as a body of 27 members, that backed Ukraine. Since then the group has shunnk to as little as the E3 (France, Britain and Germany) that have led the support. And even that looks likely to shrink again as both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are headed for the door. Kyiv's support at the UN has increasingly come to rest on Europe and a dwindling handful of Pacific and Latin American allies. The US is acting as a broker rather than an ally. Much of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Gulf prefers to abstain rather than choose a side and all are drifting closer to Russia and China as the post Pax Americana world emerges.

Zelenskiy goal has been to pressure partners, Trump in particular, to press Putin into calling a halt to attacks on Ukraine’s power assets as the snow approaches, but he came way from the meetings with next to nothing other than new set of vague promises from the meeting plus a ticking off by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for not doing enough to curb corruption. And piece of paper with only 51 signatures on it.